Reciprocal Causality in an Event-Filled World 9781978709782, 9781978709799, 1978709781

Table of contents :
Contents
Introduction
Part I: Bergson and Whitehead on the One and the Many from a Process-Oriented Approach
1. Living in an Event-Filled World
2. Living in a Dynamically Interconnected World
3. Living in a World of Open-Ended Systems
Part II: Failure to Deal with Major Issues of the Common Good
4. Critical Evaluation of Modern Scientific Method
5. Reconciling the Truth-Claims of Science and Religion
Part III: Reason and Revelation in Dealing with the Environmental Crisis
6. A Systems-Oriented Environmental Ethic
7. Divine and Human Personhood in a Systems-Oriented Approach to Reality
8. Linking Science and Religion within a New Worldview
9. Summary and Critical Evaluation of My Hypothesis
Bibliography
Index
About the Author

Citation preview

Reciprocal Causality in an Event-Filled World

Reciprocal Causality in an Event-Filled World

Joseph A. Bracken

L E X I N G T O N B O O K S/F O R T R E S S AC A D E M I C

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books/Fortress Academic Lexington Books is an imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE, United Kingdom Copyright © 2022 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Title: Reciprocal causality in an event-filled world / Joseph A. Bracken, S.J. Description: Lanham, Maryland : Lexington Books/Fortress Academic, [2022] | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “Joseph Bracken examines key writings of processoriented philosophers like Alfred North Whitehead along with systems-oriented thinkers such as Ludwig von Bertalanffy to create a systems-oriented understanding of the God-world relation that serves as a complement to Pope Francis’s reflections on the environmental crisis”—Provided by publisher. Identifiers: LCCN 2021051369 (print) | LCCN 2021051370 (ebook) | ISBN 9781978709782 (cloth) | ISBN 9781978709799 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Human ecology—Religious aspects. | System theory. Classification: LCC GF80 .B688 2022 (print) | LCC GF80 (ebook) | DDC 201/.77— dc23/eng/20211204 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021051369 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021051370 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Introduction vii PART I: BERGSON AND WHITEHEAD ON THE ONE AND THE MANY FROM A PROCESS-ORIENTED APPROACH

1

1  Living in an Event-Filled World

3

2  Living in a Dynamically Interconnected World

19

3  Living in a World of Open-Ended Systems

39

PART II: FAILURE TO DEAL WITH MAJOR ISSUES OF THE COMMON GOOD

57

4  Critical Evaluation of Modern Scientific Method

59

5  Reconciling the Truth-Claims of Science and Religion

73

PART III: REASON AND REVELATION IN DEALING WITH THE ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS

85

6  A Systems-Oriented Environmental Ethic

87

7  D  ivine and Human Personhood in a Systems-Oriented Approach to Reality

101

8  Linking Science and Religion within a New Worldview

119

9  Summary and Critical Evaluation of My Hypothesis

133

v

vi

Contents

Bibliography 145 Index 149 About the Author

153

Introduction

Human beings live unconsciously in two different worlds. There is the invisible world of quantum mechanics that is constituted by a vast web of dynamically interconnected electromagnetic fields and the energy events continually taking place within them.1 But there is also the visible world constituted by a network of interconnected things, starting with oneself as an individual entity or Aristotelian “substance.” Since the world of quantum mechanics represents physical reality at its most primitive level of existence and activity, one would think that the world of commonsense experience should be somehow derivative from the quantum world of interconnected energy events. Yet theoretical physicists are not in agreement on how these two worlds are related to one another.2 Hence, for most people it seems to be more in line with common sense to live in the stable, relatively unchanging world of individual things. But there are losses as well as gains for human beings as a result. Human beings claim to be free. But their freedom of choice at any given moment is more restricted than they realize. As Martin Buber noted in his celebrated book I-Thou, human beings find themselves living in a world largely governed by impersonal I-It relations rather than by interpersonal I-Thou relations.3 As a result, in dealing with other human beings and the world of nature, human beings have to curtail or repress some of their personal creativity and spontaneity to fit into the objective workings of the various economic, political, social, and cultural systems in their lives. In principle, they should be able through common agreement to change or modify at least some of those systems. But all too often, ordinary people are discouraged by the size and scope of those all-encompassing systems and as a result, feel helpless to change them even though they recognize that the systems in vii

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Introduction

question seem to function in favor of the rich and powerful and contrary to their own needs and desires as well as those of many other people.4 With this book I do not offer any immediate solution to that issue. But I do agree with Arran Gare, professor of philosophy at Swinburne University in southeastern Australia, that the sense of being trapped in an unfair economic, political, social, or racial system will never be properly addressed and eventually resolved without attention to a change of worldview in which more emphasis is laid on the common good and the socially constituted character of reality.5 Pope Francis, current head of the Roman Catholic Church, seems to make the same point in his recent encyclical letter on the worldwide environmental crisis: The basic problem goes even deeper: it is the way that humanity has taken up technology and its development according to an undifferentiated and onedimensional paradigm. This paradigm exalts the concept of a subject who, using logical and rational procedures, progressively approaches and gains control over an external object. The subject makes every effort to establish the scientific and experimental method, which in itself is already a technique of possession, mastery and transformation.6

The Pope is pointing here to a key philosophical issue, namely, the proper relation between individual human beings and the socially organized groups to which they belong and on which they depend for their well-being and survival (e.g., families, local communities, economic and political organizations, even the non-human physical environment). Do the individuals recognize that as members of these groups they have corporate responsibilities as well as individual rights vis-à-vis others in the group? Pope Francis further comments that openness to other human beings is grounded in an implicit I-Thou relation. Likewise, a correct relationship with the created world demands that we not weaken this social dimension of openness to others, much less the transcendent dimension of our openness to the “Thou” of God.7 What Pope Francis seems to want here is a new worldview or a new metaphysics emphasizing interpersonal relations with other human beings and at least something like intersubjective relations with all other living creatures (e.g., animals with sense perception and even plants which instinctively respond to their environment). Otherwise, the rugged individualism of contemporary Western culture will never be fully challenged and resisted. But, if this proposal is indeed the case, should the classical metaphysics of Aristotle that was largely focused on universally binding cause-effect relations between individual entities still be employed today in the modern era to resolve conflicts of interest between individuals and rival groups of individuals? Admittedly, Thomas Aquinas and other medieval philosophers and theologians used Aristotle’s metaphysics to great advantage in explaining the Christian belief system to their contemporaries. But has Western



Introduction ix

civilization sufficiently changed in character so that a new and more up-todate worldview is needed not only to explain traditional Christian doctrine but also properly to analyze and critique the complex structures of contemporary society? This book argues that a new starting point grounded in a new systems-oriented approach to reality is desperately needed. That is, instead of presupposing that individual entities (from atoms to individual human beings) are the basic units of physical reality, organized groups of entities, or systems are the enduring building blocks of reality. Individual entities should then be seen as integral parts or members of groups that existed before themselves and that will last much longer than themselves. The proper goal of human life, accordingly, would be to participate in and contribute to the enduring social groups of which one is a member while still enjoying their benefits for oneself and others at the same time. The basic notion of a system must, however, in that case, be carefully defined to keep a balance between the rights of the individual members of a system and their expected contribution to the common good. A system, in other words, must be as far as possible open-ended, capable of revision in the light of a changing environment and the needs of its members. In his criticism of the way that economic, political, and cultural systems tyrannize over the deeper interests and desires of their person members, Pope Francis notes that, while market forces tend to control the world economy, the market cannot guarantee broader human values (e.g., personal development and greater social inclusion).8 Yet, as I see it, this will realistically only happen if the system as a whole and all of its parts or members are dynamically interconnected. Thus the parts in their individual relation to one another co-condition the governing structure or basic mode of operation of the system from moment to moment. But the system in turn reciprocally conditions the spatial-temporal parameters for the parts at the same time. But, as I explain here, that in turn only happens if the system in question is an organism and if all its constituent parts or members are alive rather than inert, mini-organisms as opposed to unchanging atoms and molecules. For, only organisms are capable of feelingoriented relations to one another and with the overall environment. Hence, only organisms can self-organize (in some way, “choose” to work together one way rather than another). Presumably, this proposal of an organically constituted world will encounter stiff resistance. Scientists will insist that this kind of theoretical proposal cannot be justified empirically. At the atomic and molecular levels of existence and activity within nature, for example, there is no clear sign of internal activity or spontaneous self-organization among individual entities. Everything seems to be fixed in place by the universal laws of nature. Even those who rely on common sense experience will object that there is an obvious difference between a machine and an organism. But, as Alister McGrath

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comments, “what we observe is not nature itself, but nature as it is disclosed by our methods of investigation.”9 In other words, we tend to find what we are antecedently looking for. That is, we look for and de facto find in our normal human experience a variety of individual entities with all kinds of contingent relations to one another. But, as a result, we pay little or no attention to the fact that all these individual entities have little or no meaning and value in themselves alone. They are determined by those same relations to one another. To explain any one entity exhaustively would involve its relation to all other entities in the universe (past and present). Contemporary scientists for their part are aware of this relationally ordered character of physical reality. But their need to comprehend and control all the empirical data in a given investigation leads them to deal simply with what is here and now quantitatively measurable in the relation of things to one another, thereby neglecting the more subtle qualitative relations of entities to one another in terms of the other senses beyond sight (e.g., sound, touch, smell). In the chapters that follow, I lay out this argument for an organically constituted world in which everything exists in dynamic relation to everything else. At the same time, I call attention to an important distinction in thinking of parts and wholes. There are qualitative wholes in which the whole is greater than and other than the sum of its parts, and there are purely quantitative wholes in which the whole is nothing more than the sum of its parts. I argue that qualitative wholes are to be found everywhere in the world of nature, even in inert things that still function as a unitary reality. Quantitative wholes, on the contrary, are, for the most part, products of the human mind with its inbuilt tendency to construct mental systems that only serve the purposes of the architect or designer. Accordingly, it was a serious mistake on the part of early modern Western scientists to become fascinated by the power of mathematics to set forth what appeared to be the universal laws of nature in abstract equations. For, scientists then were unconsciously guilty of what Alfred North Whitehead calls “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness”—that is, mistaking abstract conceptions of reality for the reality itself in empirical detail.10 Yet, as Stephen Hawking commented at the end of his book A Brief History of Time, “[w]hat is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?”11 From a Christian perspective, that “fire” can only come from the creativity eternally present in God’s own life and lent by God to the creatures of this world, above all, human beings, in the course of their long historical evolution. Thus, in part 1 of the book, I first analyze and critique the cosmology of two early-twentieth-century process-oriented philosophers, Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead. Bergson proposed that physical reality is an ongoing process, a cumulative flow of events in a given direction. Whitehead, in turn, claimed that this flow of events only happens because atoms and molecules, the ultimate constituents of physical reality, are not inert



Introduction xi

mini-things but mini-organisms—that is, momentary self-constituting subjects of experience (actual entities) that inherit a given pattern of existence and activity from their predecessors and communicate that same pattern in slightly altered form to their successors. Then, in the third chapter of part 1, I try to synthesize the insights of Bergson and Whitehead into the processoriented approach to reality through appeal to the work of Alexander Bogdanov, Ludwig von Bertalanffy, and their successors in systems theory. That is, I lay out my systems-oriented worldview in which lower-order systems serve as the necessary infrastructure for the mode of operation of higher-order systems, and the higher-order systems give further meaning and value to the workings of the lower-order systems. In this way, the ongoing evolution of the size and structure of the universe proceeds more from the bottom-up than from the top-down (as in classical metaphysics). Yet there is still top-down causality at work in higher-order systems insofar as the governing structure of a higher-order system still regulates and controls the activity of the lowerorder systems beneath it. Afterward, in part 2 of the book, I evaluate whether or not a systemsoriented worldview offers a credible response or effective remedy to the contemporary problem of massive environmental change with its negative consequences for the well-being and even survival of life on earth. For, as I see it, neither the great bulk of contemporary natural scientists nor most religiously oriented philosophers and theologians, albeit for vastly different reasons, seem ready and willing to meet the challenge of a systems-oriented worldview. Yet a prominent environmental thinker, Holmes Rolston III at Colorado State University, has worked out environmental ethics that is indeed grounded in the presupposition of an organically constituted world order—that is, a hierarchy of dynamically interrelated and interdependent systems. So it can be done. What impedes work along those lines, however, is the implicit materialism and deterministic assumptions of contemporary natural science in explaining the dynamics of evolution. Two philosophers of science, Aaron Gare and Robert Ulanowicz, the one in Australia and the other in the United States, have made clear, however, the lack of philosophical perspective in conventional systems-oriented thinking. Then, with aid of historical insights from the history of science in Western civilization, I analyze and critique the failure of Christian thinkers over the years to make the transit from the substance-oriented approach to reality in classical metaphysics to a more contemporary systems-oriented approach to reality as the most appropriate philosophical underpinning for contemporary theological articulation of the Christian belief system. Finally, in part 3 of the book I first offer my version of a systems-oriented approach to the Christian God-world relationship as a way to deal with the twin problems of massive environmental change and the seeming indifference of contemporary human beings to do anything about it. First, in chapter

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Introduction

7 I outline systems-oriented panentheism in which the divine life-system proper to the three divine persons of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity serves not only as the First Cause and Ultimate End of the cosmic process but also as the exemplar or prime analogate for the pattern of self-organization operative in the world of nature and in all human communities. Then, in chapter 8 I summarize and critique the encyclical letter of Pope Francis on the environmental crisis and indicate how something like my own systemsoriented approach to the God-world relationship seems to be present in his effort to provide strong religious motivation for dealing with the environmental crisis. Finally, in the last chapter I summarize the overall argument of the book and indicate how it is based on the paradigm or model of an organism. For an organism (unlike an Aristotelian substance or individual entity) presupposes reciprocal rather than unilateral causal relations between Parts and Wholes in their ongoing interaction. Evolution proceeds inwardly more from the bottom-up than from the top-down via an extrinsic source (a Creator God). Yet causation from the top-down is still present in the way that Divine Creativity is lent to creatures (notably, human beings) to make their own decisions, with a “nudge” or two in the right direction between the subjective constituents of a system and the system itself as an objective reality in its own right. The world, then, is an organically constituted Whole that is more than and other than the arithmetic sum of its parts or members and yet is dependent on their dynamic interplay with one another from moment to moment so as itself to remain in existence.12 NOTES  1. Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, trans. Simon Carnell and Erica Segre (New York: Penguin Books, 2015), 30–31. See also Lawrence W. Fagg, Electromagnetism and the Sacred: At the Frontier of Spirit and Matter (New York: Continuum, 1999), 57–58.  2. Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons, 37–48.  3. Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Scribner’s, 1970), 57–58.   4.  Arran Gare, The Philosophical Foundations of Ecological Civilization: A Manifesto for the Future (New York: Routledge, 1917), 1–8.  5. Ibid., 177–212.  6. Pope Francis, On Care for Our Common Home [Laudato Si’] (Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2015), 51, n. 106.   7.  Ibid., 58, n. 119.   8.  Ibid., 53, n. 109.   9.  Alister E. McGrath, “Loving Science, Discovering God,” Theology and Science 17, no. 4 (November 2019): 440. 10.  Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Free Press, 1967), 50–51. 11.  Stephen Hawking, A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes (New York: Bantam Books, 1990), 174.



Introduction xiii

12.  See also Philip Clayton and Wm. Andrew Schwartz, What Is Ecological Civilization? Crisis, Hope, and the Future of the Plane (Anoka, MN: Process Century Press, 2019). These authors see the need for a new philosophical paradigm to deal effectively with the current environmental crisis but also offer practical suggestions on how to apply the paradigm to concrete situations, contemporary society, a project beyond the scope of this book.

Part I

BERGSON AND WHITEHEAD ON THE ONE AND THE MANY FROM A PROCESSORIENTED APPROACH

Chapter One

Living in an Event-Filled World

An event is something that happens. It begins and it ends. In that time, it moves from what could happen to what did happen, from potentiality to actuality. But what is it in itself? Is it an object of thought? No; it happens too fast to be an object of thought. There are, of course, major events that are readily comprehended and minor events that contribute to the broader reality of major events. A parade, for example, is a major event taking place in space and time. But it involves an enormous number of lesser events to make it happen, and these lesser events (e.g., band members playing their instruments) are in turn themselves constituted by even smaller events (bodily movements). Hence, an event-filled world is enormously complex by comparison with a world seemingly constituted by relatively stable things that do not change much in their ongoing relation to one another. As I explain next, however, what we consider to be the unchanging world of things is an abstraction from an over-simplification of a much more complex world of ever-changing events. I argue that an event of any size or duration is the objective manifestation of the interior workings of a mini-organism, an entity endowed with subjectivity, the potentiality to become other than what it is right now. In the terminology of Alfred North Whitehead, it is the “superject” or outward expression of an “actual entity” (a momentary self-constituting subject of experience). It is, accordingly, a dual-dimensional reality—that is, both a newly actualized potentiality and at the same time a here and now actuality with potentiality for further growth.1 An object of thought, for example, is simply an actuality; it has no potentiality to become other than what it is right now. An entity endowed with both subjectivity and objectivity, however, experiences change from moment to moment in that it is always the effect of prior events and the cause of later events. In classical metaphysics, one accounts 3

4

Chapter One

for this transition of an entity from potentiality to actuality through unilateral cause-effect relations. A finite entity is always the relatively passive effect of the activity of another entity. This first entity, however, exists on its own, quite apart from its being the effect of something else happening. A match burns whether it burns something else or not. It is, accordingly, not internally related to other entities in the same way that successive events are internally related to one another.2 In brief, then, a single event is hard to define or “pin down” since it is comprehended by a human being only after it has already taken place. That which was previously only a possibility has become an actuality in virtue of its own internal power of self-constitution. That is, in contrast to the common-sense belief that God alone brings the things of this world into existence, I instead argue that this belief is only half right. God provides the creativity needed for the finite entity to become itself from moment to moment. Each moment of its existence is then a new event. But we only realize that it is really new when we compare the present moment with what was the case a moment ago or even years ago. Two early twentieth-century philosophers, Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead, tried to explain this elusive reality of movement or change. Their common starting point was introspection into the way their mind worked, how it is never precisely the same in terms of its object of thought from moment to moment. Bergson as a result concluded that change is an ever-flowing series of momentary events, whereas Whitehead concluded that change is both continuous and discontinuous—that is, broken up into discrete units that rapidly succeed one another and thus create the sense of a continuous flow. Yet both agreed that what has happened in the past conditions the reality of what is going on right now in the present and that the present will similarly influence the reality of the future. They also agreed that change is cumulative; things evolve and change character with time. In that sense, both were in favor of some measure of open-endedness and contingency within the flow of events rather than total predictability and thus a deterministic approach to reality. In this chapter, I will provide a summary of the worldview of Bergson as outlined in his book, Creative Evolution, and evaluate its strengths and weaknesses vis-à-vis beliefs about the nature of reality in classical metaphysics and natural science since the time of Galileo. In the next chapter I will do the same for Whitehead in two of his major works, namely, Science and the Modern World and Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology.



Living in an Event-Filled World 5

BERGSON ON THE EXPLOSIVE FORCE OF LIFE In the first chapter of his book Creative Evolution, Bergson notes that human beings deal more readily with inanimate objects than with organisms that grow and develop over time.3 As noted previously, movement from potentiality to actuality is hard to grasp because we human beings cannot comprehend it until it is finished. As a result, natural scientists, and even an evolutionary thinker like Herbert Spencer, do not hesitate “to extend to the things of life the same methods of explanation which have succeeded in the case of [inert] unorganized matter.”4 That is, Spenser and other scientists treat what is actually a process of internal self-constitution as a “thing,” an inert or inanimate reality. Bergson, however, looks inward at the flow of his own internal consciousness. “I find, first of all, that I pass from state to state . . . I change, then, without ceasing.”5 My feelings, my thoughts, and volitions are ever in flux, never the same from moment to moment. I assume that I have an unchanging ego undergirding this flow of feelings, thoughts, and desires but that is an unconscious trick that my mind plays to allow my mind to believe that it is an ever-the-same reality.6 The feeling of movement or what Bergson calls “duration” is, on the contrary, much more real. “Duration is the continuous progress of the past which gnaws into the future and which swells as it advances. . . . Doubtless we think with only a small part of our past, but it is with our entire past, including the original bent of our soul, that we desire, will and act.”7 (Bergson assumes here a difference between thinking and acting that he develops.) He then concludes that “for a conscious being, to exist is to change, to change is to mature, to mature is to go on creating oneself endlessly.”8 Should not the same be said for reality in general? Yet a distinction still has to be made between organic and inorganic bodies. Inanimate material objects like machines are inorganic bodies since they have replaceable parts and thus have no internal organization and thus no history of growth and development.9 Such inorganic or inert bodies, however, exist in an external environment that does change over time. Accordingly, the notion of a fully inert or inorganic body must itself be the result of an unconscious mental abstraction from an ever-changing reality rather than a genuinely fixed reality in its own right.10 Machines are ever the same; but the environmental context in which they are located keeps changing and the machine itself ages with time.11 Organisms or living bodies, however, reproduce one another, something beyond the capability of an inert thing or machine. There is then a “cardinal difference between concrete time, along which a real system develops, and that abstract time which enters into our speculations on artificial systems.”12 Natural scientists, for example, mentally construct artificial systems based on abstract time—that is, time that can be broken up into quantitatively measurable units. Systems at work in the world of nature, however, are alive and

6

Chapter One

based on concrete time. They keep changing, however slightly from moment to moment. Bergson then takes up the related topic of transformism, namely, the proposal that the individual organism in its embryonic development reproduces the same transformations in its growth as the species to which it belongs passed in becoming a different species than its predecessors, above all, its immediate predecessor.13 This hypothesis that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny has been subsequently discredited, but Bergson’s main point remains tenable, namely, that “organic evolution resembles the evolution of a consciousness, in which the past presses against the present and causes the upspringing of a new form of consciousness, incommensurable with its antecedents.”14 Thus life, wherever it is found, is like human consciousness continually recreating itself. It cannot be fully understood in terms of the laws of physics and chemistry which expressly deal with inanimate objects in relatively abstract, timeless terms.15 Bergson, accordingly, is opposed to a purely mechanistic approach to physical reality, but he is equally opposed to radical finalism: “The doctrine of teleology, in its extreme form, as we find it in Leibniz for example, implies that things and beings merely realize a program previously arranged. But if there is nothing unforeseen, no invention or creation in the universe, time is useless again. As in the mechanistic hypothesis, here again it is supposed that all is given. Finalism thus understood is only inverted mechanism.”16 But there is a form of finalism of which he approves, namely, external (as opposed to internal) finalism. That is, whereas internal finalism claims that every organism is organized to achieve an end proper to itself as an individual entity, external finality proposes that organisms are ordered to one another in the achievement of a more comprehensive whole, life as an ongoing evolutionary process. The individual organism is much too dependent upon other organisms and the environment to be a self-sufficient entity in its own right with its own vital principle.17 On the contrary, “from its origin, it [life] is a continuation of one and the same impetus, divided into divergent lines of evolution.”18 Millions of individual entities are thus involved in the overall movement of the evolutionary process. “[N]evertheless, it is in virtue of the primitive impetus of the whole that the movement of the parts continues. Something of the whole, therefore, must abide in the parts; and this common element will be evident to us in some way, perhaps by the presence of identical organs in very different organisms.”19 This resemblance of structure in different organisms is conventionally explained by adaptation in one of two ways. Either the organism is positively influenced by extrinsic environmental conditions and is changed accordingly, or it is negatively influenced by these extrinsic conditions and excludes them.20 Bergson disagrees. For, in his mind, there is no preexisting substantial form at work to shape the organism to its surroundings. “Life



Living in an Event-Filled World 7

must create a form for itself, suited to the circumstances made for it.”21 The organism, accordingly, must creatively respond to its environment; it cannot mechanically adapt to it on the chance that a series of accidental variations will over time produce a new species (as in Darwin’s theory of natural selection). There must be instead an inner directing principle to account for this convergence of seemingly independent effects.22 Yet Bergson also has misgivings with Jean Baptiste Lamarck’s theory of the inheritance of acquired characteristics through use and disuse of different body parts. “That an organ can be strengthened and grow by exercise, nobody will deny. But it is a long way from that to the progressive development of an eye like that of the molluscs and of vertebrates.”23 Passive reception of light by the organ is clearly insufficient. But if an internal principle is said to be at work in the evolutionary emergence of an eye, what is it? Effort alone does not affect its internal constitution. Continued use of a body part generates a habit. But is the habit transmitted to offspring through the body cells or the germ-line? “Thus, for instance, there is no proof that the mole has become blind because it has formed the habit of living underground; it is perhaps because its eyes were becoming atrophied that it condemned itself to a life underground.”24 Bergson concludes: “[T]he habits formed by an individual have probably no echo in its offspring; and, when they have, the modification in the descendants may have no visible likeness to the original one.”25 What is most likely transmitted is not a fixed habit but a natural tendency to respond to new situations in roughly the same way. Accordingly, the neo-Darwinians are justified in claiming that differences from one generation to another in a given species are to be found in modification of the germ-line, not in the habitual behavior of the earlier group. Yet these differences in the germ-line are not accidental, nor are they limited to individual members of a species. “The tendency to change, therefore, is not accidental.”26 Here Bergson refers back to his earlier hypothesis that life from its origin is “the continuation of one and the same impetus, divided into divergent lines of evolution.”27 That is, there is “an original impetus of life, passing from one generation of germs to the following generation of germs through the developed organisms which bridge the interval between the generations.”28 Individual organisms and entire species increasingly differ from one another over time. But they come from a “common stock” and thus constitute an ongoing unity in diversity of dynamically interrelated parts or members as a result. For example, if I raise my hand from A to B, it is a simple indivisible act. But in picturing the movement as a line from A to B that can be broken up into successive points, I lose the reality of the movement. For, if I focus on the distance between the points, I am a mechanist. If I focus on the internal order of the points to one another, I am a radical finalist, thinking in terms of a foreseeable outcome.29 In both cases, I am abstracting from lived

8

Chapter One

experience to render it intelligible to myself. Bergson recognizes, of course, that one needs to treat the things of this world as machines to control them for human purposes. In this sense, human beings “manufacture” a unity out of preexisting parts. Nature, on the contrary, “organizes” the things of this world by proceeding from an original unity to progressive differentiation via a succession of individual entities that are both alike and unlike one another.30 This completes my analysis of the basic principles of Bergson’s evolutionary cosmology in chapter 1 of Creative Evolution. In what follows, I summarize subsequent chapters. Early in chapter 2, Bergson takes note of two contrasting tendencies within the evolutionary process: the explosive power of life and the resistance of inert matter.31 Accordingly, evolution proves to be “something entirely different from a series of adaptations to circumstances, as mechanism claims; entirely different also from the realization of a plan of the whole, as maintained by the doctrine of finality.”32 To explain this latest point, he points to the different ways in which the same life principle works in plants and animals. A vegetable derives its nutrients directly from air, water, and soil. An animal, on the contrary, derives its nutrients from eating plants or lower-order species of animals that eat plants. Hence, while plants can remain in one place, animals have to move to survive and grow. Some form of consciousness, however, is necessary to achieve mobility. Hence, “it seems to us most probable that the animal cell and the vegetable cell are derived from a common stock, and that the first live organisms oscillated between the vegetable form and the animal form, participating in both at once.”33 This is, of course, a conjecture on Bergson’s part, but it illustrates his basic thesis that life is a creative process involving unity-in-diversity among multiple interrelated parts or members. The forward thrust of life serves to insert indetermination into inert matter. “Indeterminate, i.e., unforeseeable, are the forms it creates in the course of its evolution.”34 Yet the inertia present in entities as a result of fixed behavior patterns is only overcome with constant effort. As a result, we tend to consider minor organisms as things or inert entities when in fact their apparently unchanging mode of operation is the outcome of the resistance of inertia to further change.35 For example, Bergson notes that arthropods (e.g., insects) live in a world dominated by instinct, whereas vertebrates (e.g., higher-order animals and especially human beings) live in a world controlled by intelligence. Yet instinct and intelligence in some form are found in both arthropods and vertebrates: “There is no intelligence in which some traces of instinct are not to be discovered, more especially no instinct that is not surrounded with a fringe of intelligence.”36 Both instinct and intelligence are, therefore, tendencies, not fixed realities. Human beings use intelligence to manufacture laborsaving instruments; Lower-order animals rely on instinct in the use of their



Living in an Event-Filled World 9

limbs and other body parts to make something happen. Yet some minimal intelligence is required to coordinate one’s instincts, and instinct is involved in fashioning tools for a specific purpose. That is, whereas instinct is based on familiarity with a given situation, intelligence relies on intuition of a new possibility and how to apply it to the task at hand.37 The big problem, of course, is that intelligence has trouble conceptualizing or even picturing movement.38 That is, intellect represents becoming as a series of mathematically ordered states, each of which is itself a fixed reality. Hence, movement as a cumulative or ever-increasing whole is lost in the focus on its individual unmoving parts.39 Intellect dissects what is alive to deal with it more easily. As a result, “the intellect lets what is new in each moment of a history escape. It does not admit the unforeseeable. It rejects all creation.”40 Instinct, however, is much closer to life as an organic, everchanging reality. Hence, while intelligence sees things from the outside as a fixed object of thought, instinct deals with things from the inside, in terms of the entity’s ever-changing reaction to its external environment which is itself subject to ongoing change.41 Yet action, getting things done, demands “the power of choice” in dealing with the world.42 The more consciousness at work in an entity, the greater the power of choice vis-à-vis something apart from oneself. In chapter 3, Bergson probes further into the link between the material world and the human mind. “The more consciousness is intellectualized, the more is matter spatialized.”43 That is, natural scientists tend to treat the world of living things as if they were inert objects of thought existing in space and time as fixed realities. In this way, they exhaustively analyze causal relations between the parts and lose the feeling of movement as an ongoing or cumulative whole at the sense level. To grasp the latter, one must plunge into the ongoing experience of duration “in which the past, always moving on, is swelling unceasingly with a present that is absolutely new.”44 Yet the past is not thereby lost. One must not lose the sense of the whole, the way the parts succeed one another. “It is in this that life and action are free.”45 Otherwise, when one relaxes one’s focus on duration and the experience of life as a continuous flow of energy, one instead begins to regard one’s experience of self and the world around oneself as a quantitative whole, something that can be divided up into measurable units like the movement of the second hand on a mechanical clock. Here intellect finds itself in a largely spatial rather than temporal context.46 Thus spatiality and materiality are linked in the exercise of intellect or mind in much the same way as temporality and ongoing movement are linked in the experience of duration or intuition (feeling-level awareness of the whole). Bergson then analyzes different understandings of order and disorder. Order is “a certain agreement between subject and object. It is the mind finding itself in things.”47 But the mind can move in two directions. In one

10

Chapter One

direction, it moves toward continuous creation and free activity. In the other direction, it moves toward a mathematical ordering of creation in terms of fixed points and unilateral causal relations. Order exists in both cases but for different reasons. “We say of astronomical phenomena that they manifest an admirable order, meaning by this that they can be foreseen mathematically. And we find an order no less admirable in a symphony of Beethoven, which is genius, originality, and therefore unforeseeability itself.”48 Bergson clearly favors this second understanding of order but sees the practical necessity of the other kind of order in human experience. The order that is offered to us piecemeal in experience is necessarily repetitive and thus presents the same character and performs the same function as the order proper to mathematics: “both cause experience to repeat itself, both enable our mind to generalize.”29 Disorder then is relative to what one expects to find. If I look for mechanical order in a context of spontaneous change, I experience a sense of disorder. But I also feel a sense of disorder when I find unexpected spontaneity and change in an otherwise mechanical pattern of existence and activity.50 Both human consciousness and the world of material reality, accordingly, are simultaneously pulled in opposite directions. In the one direction, both the human mind and the material world move in the direction of expenditure of energy in the search for further spontaneity and change; in the other direction, both are moved toward conservation of energy by way of resistance to change. Reality as a whole then (like the human mind) is both making itself and unmaking itself at every moment.51 Admittedly, only God is purely creative: “unceasing life, action, freedom” producing other living beings directly.52 Human beings, faced with the constraints of material reality all around them, have to conserve energy as well as expend it. As a result, they all too often end up living in a world of seemingly inanimate and immobile things, themselves included. To stay alive, two things are necessary: “(1) a gradual accumulation of energy; (2) an elastic canalization of this energy in variable and indeterminable directions, at the end of which are free acts.”53 Still another form of tension between and among entities is the tendency to individualization and a counter-tendency to association. “Individuals join together into a society; but the society, as soon as it is formed, tends to melt the associated individuals into a new organism, so as to become itself an individual, able in turn to be part and parcel of a new association.”54 Hence, “the vital impulse communicates to a material entity the inclination to both unity and multiplicity, forcing it to choose first one, then the other. Animals endowed with a brain and nervous system are better equipped than plants to make choices between alternatives in this way. Only in human beings, however, is consciousness truly free; everywhere else consciousness has remained the captive of the mechanisms it has set up.”55



Living in an Event-Filled World 11

Life or the vital impulse, therefore, transcends “finality”—that is, a predetermined plan for the outcome of the evolutionary process. For the same reason, humanity is not the goal of the cosmic process; “evolution has been accomplished on several divergent lines, and while the human species is at the end of one of them, other lines have been followed with other species at their end.”56 Furthermore, humanity itself developed only along one line of evolution: Consciousness, in man, is pre-eminently intellect, it might have been, it ought, so it seems, to have been also intuition. Intuition and intellect represent two opposite directions of the work of consciousness: intuition goes in the very direction of life, intellect goes in the inverse direction, and thus finds itself in accordance with the movement of matter. . . . A different evolution might have led to a humanity either more intellectual still or more intuitive. In the humanity of which we are a part, intuition is, in fact, almost completely sacrificed to intellect.57

Bergson thus makes clear here his preference for intuition (i.e., identification with the ongoing flow of life, over intellect; mastery of the forces of nature for the achievement of goals and values proper to human life). For, in his mind, intuition, the concrete experience of the flow of the life-principle within oneself, bonds one with the world of nature in a way that intellect with its inevitable subject-object approach to the world around itself does not allow.58 In the fourth and last chapter of the book, Bergson dispels two “illusions” that inhibit our human understanding and appreciation of the evolutionary process in which we find ourselves. The first is the feeling that the feelings of absence and presence are relative to what we want or expect to be the case. “[F]or we are immersed in realities and cannot pass out of them; only, if the present reality is not the one we are seeking, we speak of the absence of this sought-for reality whenever we find the presence of another.”59 Bergson is asking here about the validity of the classical ontological question: namely, why there is something rather than nothing. Does reality from moment to moment bring itself into being out of a preexistent fullness? For, try as I might, I cannot conceive or even imagine nonbeing. “I am always perceiving something, either from without or from within. When I no longer know anything of external objects, it is because I have taken refuge in the consciousness that I have of myself. If I abolish this inner self, its very abolition becomes an object for an imaginary self which now perceives as an external object the self that is dying away.”60 Bergson is obviously focused here on the present moment of experience which as an actuality necessarily exists. But he thereby loses the equally important reality of finality or directionality for proper understanding of the evolutionary process. The vital source or life-principle, for example, is not in

12

Chapter One

and of itself intelligent; conceivably, it empowers movement but does not act to direct it. It does not envision the future in abstract terms and weigh alternatives for achieving goals and values in the future. Admittedly, Bergson’s broader aim here is to refute the idea that there are realities that are eternal and thus unchanging, outside the temporal flow of the cosmic process.61 But to be eternal does not mean that an entity is unchanging. It only means that it does not experience the same sense of duration or temporal process as a human being. It undergoes change within its own experience of space and time. For example, the Creator God of Biblical revelation presumably exists in a different time-space context than human beings and other finite entities within the current evolutionary process. A thousand years for human beings would quite possibly be a single day in the life experience of a God who may well have brought into existence an ongoing series of world processes (Psalm 90:4). Bergson, in other words, is more anthropocentric in his thinking than he realizes. That is, he presumes that every other living creature experiences the same space-time parameters as human beings. But is that really the case? An insect that lives only a few days before expiring surely experiences a different sense of space and time than a human being; if capable of reflection, it would consider the life-span of a human being to be virtually eternal. Likewise, a redwood tree in California whose duration or life-span may last hundreds of years but always in the same physical location presumably would have a collectively different “experience” of space and time than a human being whose life-span is much too short. Turning next to the relationship between Being and Becoming in classical metaphysics, Bergson notes that “the body is changing form at every moment; or rather, there is no form, since form is immobile and the reality is movement. What is real is the continual change of form; form is only a snapshot view of a transition.”62 Admittedly, human beings tend to ignore the different ways that form undergoes change if they focus on the abstract notion of becoming as a series of steps or momentary states of being in rapid succession.63 Bergson, for example, points to Zeno’s paradoxes: an arrow in flight that is never at rest anywhere; Achilles never catches up with the tortoise. Genuine becoming is, therefore, lost when one breaks it up into successive stages (e.g., childhood and manhood as separate realities).64 In the remainder of chapter 4, Bergson reviews the history of Western philosophy, starting with the philosophy of eternal and unchanging Forms developed by Plato and his followers to give priority to Being over Becoming. Form for Plato is associated with three realities: the essence of an entity, its customary mode of activity, and its distinguishing characteristics. These ontological categories are in turn linked with three grammatical categories: the subject, the predicate, and adjectives.65 Aristotle in turn identified the Unmoved Mover as both primordial subject of predication and First Cause



Living in an Event-Filled World 13

of everything else that exists in a world of finite entities continually being moved by another.66 In this way, everything is derived from a logical first principle, and everything ontologically aspires to return to it.67 Science, both ancient and modern, tends to follow this same deterministic approach to reality. The essential object of science is “to enlarge our influence over things.”68 Admittedly, while ancient science classified things qualitatively in terms of genera and species, modern science measures things quantitatively in terms of their respective magnitudes vis-à-vis one another. Galileo’s law of falling bodies, for example, links space (distance traveled) with varying time intervals for a body in free fall.69 But “real time thereby escapes the hold of scientific knowledge with its exclusive focus on spatial dimensions. Intellect with its fixed logical categories should, therefore, be supplemented at every moment by intuition, the experience of change.”70 Descartes saw the problem and tried to solve it by way of a compromise. With reference to material reality, everything is strictly governed by unchanging mathematical principles; but in the world of the spirit, God and human beings exercise freedom of choice in time and contingency prevails.71 Spinoza and Leibniz continued this demarcation or dividing line between matter and spirit in the philosophy of Descartes, albeit from different points of view. That is, Spinoza proposed that both Thought and Extension are attributes of one and the same underlying substance, namely, God. Leibniz attributed Thought primarily to God and secondarily to human beings. Both Spinoza and Leibniz, therefore, thought of the God-world relationship in deterministic terms, namely, as a purely Quantitative Whole with parts or members permanently fixed in their relations to one another.72 Immanuel Kant likewise presupposed that the world of science is deterministic in its workings. But, better than his predecessors, he saw that the universe “can only be a system of laws if phenomena have passed beforehand through the filter of an intellect.”73 That is, laws are based on specific relationships between different entities; only an intellect can grasp conceptually the meaning of a relation. This intellect could be the mind of God, but it could also be the human mind, that which is common to all human beings in the act of cognition. In this way, human beings should no longer seek the universal laws of nature in external reality but instead through careful introspection into the way that the human mind universally operates.74 But, given the focus on the human mind in general terms, Kant remained in the purely conceptual order dealing with universal laws rather than in the experiential or intuitive order where spontaneity and unpredictability are at work. For example, in Kant’s view, there is no possibility of a reciprocal relation between the human mind and the world of nature; the mind unilaterally imposes its predetermined mental structures on the data of sense experience.75 Hence, the human mind never penetrates to the thing in itself (Ding an sich) but only to the laws governing the appearance of things. For Bergson,

14

Chapter One

however, mind and matter exist in reciprocal interaction, “intellect modeling itself on corporeity, and corporeity on intellect.”73 Among nineteenth-century philosophers after Kant, Bergson singles out Herbert Spenser for further analysis and critique. Spenser was convinced that a purely mechanistic approach to reality was discredited by Charles Darwin’s theory on the origin of species in virtue of the contingent character of natural selection. But, in Bergson’s view, Spenser was still committed to a mechanistic approach to reality since he did not recognize that the underlying flow of the life-principle is the real reason that various changes in the structure and mode of operation of an organism eventually result in the emergence of a new species.77 Instead, Spenser tried to reconstruct the evolutionary process by adding one small change to another until a new organic reality was reproduced in his own mind.78 As a result, Spenser was still unconsciously a mechanist since he did not experience firsthand or intuit the spontaneous movement of the cosmic process and then ask himself how each new organism could thus over time have gradually emerged. Instead, he began with the reality of the new organism, broke it down in terms of its current parts or members, and then mentally reconstructed it as the sum of its parts or as a well-functioning machine.79 This is still the analytical approach to reality that was so successful in the time of Galileo and Newton but which does not come to grips with evolution as an ever-changing reality whose mode of operation and directionality cannot be predicted in advance. Hence, although Spenser claims to be an evolutionary thinker, he is basically still a mechanist in his thinking and interprets Darwin’s theory of natural selection mechanistically. Bergson ends his book by emphasizing the contrasting functions of instinct and intellect in the human mind. Intellect is employed in the service of action. That is, intellect “cuts up the material world according to the lines that its action must follow.”80 To be able to control the forces of nature to achieve various goals and values, the intellect reduces entities into their component parts and then either takes note of how the parts are currently related to one another or proceeds to rearrange the parts to accomplish some further end. Either way, the intellect loses the flow of life both in its own mental operations and in the world at large.81 Intuition, on the contrary, stays in touch on a feeling-level with the ongoing flow of the life principle and thus is in a better position to experience the deeper workings of life and consciousness both within the mind and in the outer world. Increased use of intuition, accordingly, could lead to an unexpected creative advance both in the natural and social sciences.82 In terms of my own hypothesis in this book, namely, the reciprocal causal relation between parts and wholes, namely, self-constituting subjects of experience and the open-ended systems into which they aggregate, I heartily endorse Bergson’s distinction between instinct and intellect. Instinct draws



Living in an Event-Filled World 15

one’s attention to the concrete experience of novelty or change from moment to moment both within the human mind and in the cosmic process as a whole. Thus, for Bergson, no two successive moments either in human consciousness or in the cosmic process are exactly the same. In both cases, the present builds upon the already existing reality of the past. The future in turn will add to the current reality of the present, whether in one’s own consciousness or in the ongoing mode of operation of the cosmic process as a whole. At the same time, intellect is needed to understand and control this ongoing flow of energy to achieve human goals and values. But, as soon as human beings resort to universal laws and mathematical equations to control the forces of nature, intuition, the feeling-level awareness of ongoing change and novelty, tends to be overlooked or deliberately ignored. As a result, one thereby sacrifices creativity, the possibility of something new and different, for the sake of order and stability. Admittedly, chaos, the total lack of order, is counterproductive and must be resisted at all costs. But ironically new forms of creativity, new possibilities for thought and action, seem to be more often emergent when an existing order is undergoing stress or even potential collapse. So a careful balance must be maintained between the functions of intellect and intuition in the human mind. Later I will sketch a process- or systems-oriented worldview as my contribution to a new world view. Beforehand, however, in chapter 2, I first turn to a critique and analysis of the world view of Alfred North Whitehead. Whitehead profited from Bergson’s insights into the interplay between instinct and intellect in the workings of the human mind. But, as a distinguished mathematician and theoretical physicist before turning to the goal of a new philosophical cosmology, Whitehead much more obviously than Bergson employed the precision of intellect in setting forth his metaphysical scheme. Yet, as we will see in chapter 2, his work also showed flashes of insight that could only have come from a key moment of intuition. NOTES  1. See Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, corrected edition, eds. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978), 18, 26. See also Aristotle, Metaphysics, 1066b.   2.  See also, W. T. Jones, A History of Western Philosophy, 2nd ed. (New York; Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969); The Classical Mind, 217–33.  3. Henri Bergson, Creative Evolution. Translated by Arthur Mitchell (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 1998), ix–x.  4. Ibid., x.  5. Ibid., 1.  6. Ibid., 4.  7. Ibid., 4–5.  8. Ibid., 7.  9. Ibid., 8.

16 10.  Ibid., 10. 11.  Ibid., 12. 12.  Ibid., 21. 13.  Ibid., 24. 14.  Ibid., 27. 15.  Ibid., 31. 16.  Ibid., 39. 17.  Ibid., 42–43. 18.  Ibid., 53. 19.  Ibid., 54. 20.  Ibid., 55. 21.  Ibid., 58. 22.  Ibid., 76. 23.  Ibid., 77. 24.  Ibid., 79. 25.  Ibid., 83. 26.  Ibid., 85. 27.  Ibid., 53. 28.  Ibid., 87. 29.  Ibid., 88–89. 30.  Ibid., 91–94. 31.  Ibid., 98. 32.  Ibid., 101–3. 33.  Ibid., 112. 34.  Ibid., 126. 35.  Ibid., 128. 36.  Ibid., 136. 37.  Ibid., 149. 38.  Ibid., 155. 39.  Ibid., 163. 40. Ibid. 41.  Ibid., 175–76. 42.  Ibid., 180. 43.  Ibid., 189. 44.  Ibid., 199–200. 45.  Ibid., 201. 46.  Ibid., 202. 47.  Ibid., 223. 48.  Ibid., 224. 49.  Ibid., 225. 50.  Ibid., 232–36. 51.  Ibid., 245. 52.  Ibid., 248. 53.  Ibid., 255. 54.  Ibid., 259. 55.  Ibid., 264. 56.  Ibid., 266. 57.  Ibid., 267. 58.  Ibid., 270–71. 59.  Ibid., 273. 60.  Ibid., 278–79. 61.  Ibid., 299. 62.  Ibid., 302. 63.  Ibid., 308. 64.  Ibid., 308–13. 65.  Ibid., 315. 67.  Ibid., 324.

Chapter One



Living in an Event-Filled World 17

68.  Ibid., 323. 69.  Ibid., 337–42. 70.  Ibid., 346. 71.  Ibid., 345–46. 72.  Ibid., 350–54. 73.  Ibid., 356. 74. Ibid., 358–59. See also Immanuel Kant, “Preface to Second Edition,” in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Translated by Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1956), B xvi. 75. Bergson, Creative Evolution, 358–59. 76.  Ibid., 361. 77.  Ibid., 364–65. 78.  Ibid., 78. 79.  Ibid., 365. “It is not by dividing the evolved that we shall reach the principle of that which evolves. It is not by recomposing the evolved with itself that we shall reproduce the evolution of which it is the term.” 80.  Ibid., 367. 81.  Ibid., 369–70. 82.  Ibid., 368–69.

Chapter Two

Living in a Dynamically Interconnected World

WHAT IS IT LIKE TO LIVE IN A DYNAMICALLY INTERCONNECTED WORLD? As noted already in the introduction, Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead interpreted movement or change quite differently. Bergson identified movement or change with a continuous flow of events; Whitehead identified it with an ongoing series of events: “drops of experience, complex and interdependent.”1 Each “drop of experience” is distinct from its predecessors and successors. Yet each new drop of experience is heavily conditioned by its predecessors and itself strongly influences the pattern or mode of operation of its successors. Neither Bergson nor Whitehead was, accordingly, an atomist in the strict sense: namely, that every event exists by itself and for itself alone. Both believed that movement or change is cumulative. The present builds upon the past and contributes to the becoming of the future. But Whitehead was clearly closer to atomism than Bergson with his emphasis on the dynamic interconnection of different events rather than as with Bergson on the growth of an ever-more complex single event. Whitehead’s emphasis on unity-in-plurality rather than simply unity or pure plurality is quite possibly due to his career as a mathematician before turning to theoretical physics and cosmology. With Bertrand Russell, he wrote Principia Mathematica, considered one of the classic texts in the logic of mathematics.2 Subsequently, however, while he continued to believe in a primordial Order of Nature, he became disenchanted with the more theoretical approach to reality that is characteristic of mathematics and became more empirically oriented in his investigation of nature.3 Moreover, in his view, contemporary natural science follows the same methodology. One begins 19

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Chapter Two

research with close attention to “irreducible and stubborn facts.”4 That is, whereas medieval philosophers and theologians put their faith in a transcendent order of things designed by an omniscient and omnipotent Creator God, natural scientists look carefully at the details of life in this world, note persistent patterns in the mode of operation of things, and formulate laws of nature based on the recurrence of these patterns to explain how things happen rather than with medieval thinkers on why things happen in accord with divine providence.5 What is thereby lost by natural scientists, of course, is a consistent philosophical as well as a scientific explanation for the laws of nature. That is, Aristotle’s metaphysics did provide a logical explanation for movement or change in an otherwise unchanging world order. Aquinas in turn adapted the causal scheme of Aristotle to his philosophical explanation of the plan of God for creation as revealed in Sacred Scripture. This ancient and medieval worldview was eventually challenged by René Descartes with a starting point for his cosmology in the maxim cogito, ergo sum, and then basically undermined in the writings of the British Empiricists, Locke and Hume. In his Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant tried to restore the objectivity of scientific research but without complete success since he could not prove that his Transcendental Categories for the analysis of empirical data are truly universal in their scope. As a result, said Whitehead, natural science at the start of the twentieth century was still lacking in the rationality, the grounding of coherent logical principles, that was characteristic of ancient and medieval science and philosophy. Accordingly, in his final years at University College, London, before accepting an appointment at Harvard University in the United States, Whitehead began thinking and writing about an intrinsic Order of Things based—on strictly philosophical principles that would be both logically coherent and at the same time applicable to the data of sense experience. Out of this speculative project came a series of books, notably Science and the Modern World in 1925 and Process and Reality in 1929 (the published version of his Gifford Lectures in 1927–1928). In this chapter, I will first summarize and critically review the various chapters of Science and the Modern World in which Whitehead surveys the history of early modern natural science and mathematics from Galileo to Einstein’s theory of special and general relativity and quantum mechanics in the twentieth century while setting forth his philosophy of organism by way of critical response. Afterward, I will indicate how this initial presentation of a philosophy of organism was further developed and refined in Process and Reality.



Living in a Dynamically Interconnected World 21

SCIENCE AND THE MODERN WORLD As already noted, Whitehead was a firm believer in an underlying Order of Things in this world, above all, in the world of nature. But he was equally convinced that this order of things was not purely mechanical. “No two days are identical, no two winters.”6 With their interest in fixed causal relations between relatively enduring things, the philosophers of antiquity and the Middle Ages ignored the individuality of things provided that they had a clear grasp of the nature or essence of things and their corresponding place in the overall order of things. Early modern scientists like Galileo, however, focused instead on careful measurement of the purely quantitative dimensions of physical reality as expressed in mathematical equations. But as a result these scientists no longer probed into the broader philosophical foundations of the world of nature. Instead, they settled for a highly debatable worldview, namely, that physical reality is grounded in an all-encompassing material void populated by changing configurations of inert bits of matter (i.e., “atoms” as in the cosmologies of the ancient Greek philosophers Democritus and Leucippus). Mathematics was very useful for measuring the interaction of these atoms with one another but it offered no further philosophical explanation as to the deeper meaning and value of material reality. That explanation can only be found, says Whitehead, through sustained introspection into the workings of human consciousness.7 That is, if human consciousness is also part of physical reality, then its mode of operation should reflect or mirror the way physical reality as a whole function. Whitehead’s thinking here is somewhat akin to Bergson’s contrast between the flow of reality in a “sense intuition” followed by abstract analysis of that same empirical reality in the workings of “intellect.” But, in Whitehead’s case, this more intuitive approach to reality led him to claim that movement or change takes place in physical reality in terms of a rapid succession of momentary events rather than with Bergson in the continuing flow of a single event. In the next chapter, Whitehead reviews the history of mathematics, beginning with the classical Greeks. He notes, for example, that mathematics allows one to establish numerical connections between things that are otherwise quite different from one another.8 Thus mathematics is based on abstraction from the concrete details of sense experience to create a numerical identity where otherwise sheer multiplicity exists.9 As mathematics becomes more and more abstract, it ironically proves to be more and more important for sustained analysis of concrete facts.10 Finally, in concluding this chapter on the history of mathematics, Whitehead calls attention to the fact that the heavily deterministic approach of mathematics to material reality has recently been challenged by observation of the somewhat unpredictable behavior of material entities at the quantum level of existence and activity in nature. This

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Chapter Two

new bit of empirical evidence, in Whitehead’s mind, raises the possibility that nature from top to bottom is alive, namely, that mini-organisms rather than inert bits of matter are the ultimate units of physical reality.11 In the next chapter, “The Century of Genius,” Whitehead praises the work of natural scientists and mathematicians of the seventeenth century in working out a new worldview based on mathematical principles. Copernicus and Galileo followed by Tycho Brahe and Johannes Kepler laid the groundwork for Isaac Newton’s Principia Mathematica. Yet Whitehead reminds the reader that the Newtonian worldview does not explain the full reality of the solar system but only sets forth certain characteristics that allow one to make projections about what will happen in the future. Mathematical systems only work well if they are deliberately isolated from attention to physical reality as a whole.12 For example, a material object is for mathematical purposes simply located “here in space and here in time, or here in space-time, in a perfectly definite sense that does not require for its explanation any reference to other regions of space-time.”13 That is, the use of mathematical equations that focus on the a-temporal purely logical relation of material objects to one another means that one has lost a sense of historical development within material reality. Likewise, if one only considers the quantitative dimensions of a material object, one loses all the qualitative aspects of the object except insofar as they too can be quantitatively measured and compared. Feeling-level perception of colors, sounds, or scents on the part of the observer is thereby eliminated from consideration in one’s analysis of the material object. Finally, the substantial or enduring reality of the thing is then simply treated as an inert and unchanging substratum for its contingent qualifications or “accidents.” Physical reality becomes “a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless,” a mechanical movement of parts without further meaning and value.14 Scientists and philosophers in the eighteenth century, however, ignored these warning signs about the limitations of the scientific method for the understanding and appreciation of physical reality. They still took for granted the existence of space and time as realities in their own right quite apart from the events that take place within them. But, says Whitehead, each historical event has its position in space and time only concerning and in combination with other events in different spaces and at different times.15 Are then space and time co-created by the ongoing succession of interrelated events? Whitehead says, yes, given his conviction that the cosmic process is by definition an evolving reality, a mega-organism that is an ongoing unity of interconnected parts or members. Whitehead then calls attention to the idiosyncratic philosophy of his predecessor in British philosophy, Bishop George Berkeley. In Berkeley’s philosophy, “mind is the only absolute reality, and the unity of reality is the unity of ideas in the mind of God.”16 Whitehead regards Berkeley’s position



Living in a Dynamically Interconnected World 23

here as exaggerated idealism, but he uses it to support his hypothesis that every actual entity is a world unto itself, albeit influenced by past events in its environment and with anticipated impact on future events.17 As a result, the world as an ongoing cosmic process is constituted over and over again by a succession of momentary subjects of experience with their allied but still numerically different ways of unifying their subjective worlds of experience.18 By way of contrast, the eighteenth-century scientific worldview does not “provide an elementary trace of the organic unity of a whole [an Order of Nature], from which the organic unities of electrons, protons, molecules, and living bodies can emerge. According to that scheme, there is no reason in the nature of things why portions of material should have any physical relation to each other.”19 Whitehead repeats this same line of thought at the end of the next chapter where he reviews what he calls the “romantic reaction” to the notion of mechanistic materialism that became so prevalent among scientists and philosophers in the nineteenth century. Poets and others in the world of arts and literature were uneasy about allegedly living in such a divided world in which some things are alive and others are not. Admittedly, Alfred Lord Tennyson in his poem In Memoriam claimed that “stars blindly run.” But Whitehead goes on to cite passages from the poems of John Milton, Alexander Pope, Matthew Arnold William Wordsworth, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, affirming their belief that “nature cannot be divorced from its aesthetic values [arising from] the brooding presence of the whole on to its various parts.”20 Whitehead likewise agrees that the plan of an organism as a whole influences the distinguishing characteristics of the parts—that is, the subordinate organisms that enter into it. In effect, then, we know the world as it really exists in and through the workings of our bodies. “In being aware of the bodily experience, we must thereby be aware of aspects of the whole spatio-temporal world as mirrored within the bodily life.”21 Only for this reason can Whitehead be sure that in studying the evolutionary growth of human consciousness, he is simultaneously studying the way that evolution proceeds in the cosmic process as a whole. For, the cosmic process is not an enormous machine in which the interplay of the parts with one another is externally regulated, but an organically constituted totality or a mega-organism in which through the ongoing spontaneous interplay of the parts there is a gradual growth in complexity and subsequent change in its ongoing mode of operation. This is, of course, likewise true of the way that human consciousness is constituted. In the next chapter, Whitehead continues to emphasize the contrasting worldviews of those in the humanities and those in the sciences. But he adds a third factor, namely, advances in technology which have completely changed the condition of human life.22 The close linkage between scientific knowledge and technological expertise, to be sure, only tends to reinforce

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the mechanistic worldview of many natural scientists. But ironically other new advances in scientific understanding of physical reality in the nineteenth century call into question the validity of a purely materialistic approach to reality. Whitehead lists four such unexpected advances. First, while from the time of Democritus and Leucippus in the preSocratic era of Western philosophy natural scientists and mathematicians had thought of space as an extended reality in which individual entities were located, in the nineteenth-century scientists were more and more inclined to think of space as an all-encompassing energy field in which changes were continually taking place.23 Second, at least some scientists began to believe that, if light is transmitted in waves, not by way of tiny corpuscles, the long­ held belief in the atomicity of material reality can be challenged. For, waves rise and fall in a continuous flow of energy. Third, energy as a result is never lost; it is only transformed from one use to another. Finally, acceptance of Darwin’s theory of natural selection implies that chance as well as law is operative in the world of nature to produce not just changes in size and shape but qualitative changes in terms of new species.24 Dogmatism as a feature of scientific method was slowly giving way to a new spirit of open-ended scientific inquiry in the nineteenth century. For example, the mass of a material reality was increasingly interpreted in terms of its energy potential, but this, in turn, led one to wonder whether the basic units or reality are still inert bits of matter or are instead energy­powered mini-organisms. Whitehead concludes: “Science is taking on a new aspect which is neither purely physical, nor purely biological. It is becoming the study of organisms. Biology is the study of the larger organisms, whereas physics is the study of the smaller organisms.”25 In both disciplines, of course, events and their internal connection to one another loom large along with the notion of what Whitehead calls “the common element of form” or “defining characteristic” as the way to link them together. Value is to be found in the sequence of interconnected events constituting a material entity rather than in the entity as simply a thing in itself. Whitehead further postulates the existence of a creative activity underlying all the events taking place in the world that gives them their coherence and value vis-à-vis one another. The result of this ongoing convergence of events is what he calls “organic mechanism.”26 That is, minor events help to shape the pattern of major events, and the pattern proper to the major event influences the pattern proper to the minor events. This can only happen, however, if one envisions organisms as the fundamental units of physical reality. Whereas within a materialistic approach to reality material entities do not evolve because there are no effective changes in the relation of their parts or members to one another, in a world constituted by organisms with dynamically interconnected parts or members, evolution in some form or other is always taking place. Endurance of pattern is what guarantees the



Living in a Dynamically Interconnected World 25

continuity of the cosmic process. That is, the process exhibits an “identity of character transmitted throughout a historical route of events. This character belongs to the whole route, and to every event of the route.”27 That identity of character or pattern, of course, is also partly derived from the interaction of the organism with its surrounding environment. Any organism that does not positively influence its environment “commits suicide.”28 Whitehead ends the chapter with an exposition of an intrinsic hierarchy of organisms. At the lowest level of organic life, he suggests that electrons and hydrogen nuclei are the most basic type of organisms.29 Atoms and molecules compose the next level of organic life. But, when these atoms and molecules aggregate into inanimate material objects (e.g. mineral deposits, rock formations), their appearance as organisms disappears; they appear to be totally lifeless or inanimate. But with the next higher level of the hierarchy, namely, cells and individual bodies, an evident pattern of sustained interaction among component parts reappears and cooperation for the sake of mutual survival and growth becomes more evident. “There are thus two sides to the machinery involved in the development of nature. On the one side, there is a given environment with organisms adapting themselves to it. . . . The other side of the evolutionary machinery, the neglected side, is expressed by the word creativeness. The organisms can create their own environment. For this purpose, the single organism is almost helpless. The adequate forces require societies of cooperating organisms.”30 Once more Whitehead is emphasizing a socially organized as opposed to an individualistic approach to reality. In the next two chapters of Science and the Modern World, Whitehead offers his own explanation of two major developments in mathematics and natural science during the twentieth century, namely, relativity theory and quantum mechanics. He first notes that “scientific theory is outrunning common sense.”31 The common-sense experience of space and time is that it is the same for all material entities irrespective of the speed at which they (or the entities that they are observing) are traveling. But this common-sense assumption has been disproven by better research tools in natural science (e.g., the interferometer of Michelson-Morley for measuring the speed of light). As Albert Einstein explained in his theory of special relativity, the parameters for the measurement of space and time change for human beings traveling through space and time with different velocities.32 For an individual watching a train pass by, the length of the windows on the train is shorter than the length of the windows as measured by a person on the train. Similarly, the passage of time as measured by someone on the train is slightly slower for the person on the train than for another person left standing on the platform and looking at his wristwatch. Thus the relative motion of objects in space-time affects the objective measurement of space and time by observers within

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their own inertial frame of reference, something that can only be remedied by use of the Lorentz transformations. Whitehead, on the contrary, offers a different understanding of space and time, based upon his philosophy of organism. That is, organisms exhibit a consistent pattern or mode of operation both as a whole and in each of their constituent parts.33 But it takes time for the pattern proper to the organism as a whole to be communicated to the parts for their specialized implementation of the pattern and for the parts in turn to influence the ongoing pattern proper to the whole. Hence, each organism exists within its own internal time-system that is at least modestly different from all other organisms.34 So, while Einstein and Whitehead both come up with the same empirical results in measuring the effect of relative motion on objects in space and time, they differ significantly in their philosophical explanations of what is happening. For Einstein material entities in space and time do not change but space and time undergo “contortions” as a result of the different velocities of those same entities in space and time. For Whitehead, organisms undergo continual change and thus space and time are experienced differently in terms of the time-system proper to each organism and even proper to the same organism at different stages of its life history.35 In his explanation of quantum theory, Whitehead calls attention to the fact that in the history of natural science since the time of Galileo and Newton a material entity has always been conceived to exist continuously, remain the same, as it passes through space and time.36 As Whitehead sees it, however, a quantum particle is not a continuously existing material reality but a succession of energy events with a persistent pattern of recurrence according to two different but closely interrelated dynamics: vibratory locomotion and vibratory organic deformation. That is, “there is vibratory locomotion of a given pattern as one whole, and there is vibratory change of pattern.”37 Such an event creates both space and time for itself. For, it takes time for a change of pattern to take place even as the organism continues to move from one location to another. “Thus the primate [mini-organism] is realized atomically in a succession of durations, each duration to be measured from one maximum [actuation of the pattern] to another.”38 As in the previous chapter on relativity theory, Whitehead here offers a different philosophical explanation of the same empirically measurable events that other natural scientists explain on the basis of materialistic determinism. With this chapter on quantum theory, Whitehead completed his survey of the history of Western natural science and mathematics while at the same time setting forth his own philosophy of organism as a more suitable philosophical infra-structure for interpreting these new developments in natural science. In the remaining five chapters of the book, he offers more generalized reflections on the logical consequences of this shift in philosophical perspective. In chapter 9 on “Science and Philosophy,” for example, he notes



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that both philosophy and religion are currently grounded more in individual subjective experience than in objective logic and rational argument. The objective approach to reality has thus become almost exclusively the domain of science.39 Yet, in dealing only with the quantitative, purely factual dimensions of physical reality, science has lost any significant critique of its philosophical presuppositions. The overall result has been an impoverished understanding of physical reality. For example, as William James points out in his essay “Does Consciousness Exist?” matter and mind are not separate realities but in some measure combined in the analysis of physical reality in its entirety.40 The human mind unifies the plurality of events occurring in the body and integrates them into its higher-order mode of operation. But then the body in its mode of operation is intrinsically affected by the pattern of existence and activity produced by the mind. This dynamic interplay between mind and body is, of course, characteristic of organisms, large and small, but not of inanimate material entities.41 Only with organisms as the basic units of reality does the world in its physical organization reflect the pattern of events in the mind, and the mind in its unifying activity reflects the ongoing structure of the world. The next two chapters deal with more abstract issues. The first titled “Abstraction” sets forth Whitehead’s understanding of “eternal objects” (universal concepts) and how they are embodied in successive “actual occasions of experience” that are perceptible as the people and things of commonsense experience.42 Eternal objects are internally related to one another in terms of interconnected potentialities for actualization in future occasions of experience. But as universal concepts, their full meaning and value transcend instantiation in any single actual occasion.43 Taken together, then, these eternal objects constitute a vast field of possibilities for any given actual occasion of experience, but only some can be positively incorporated into its immediate field of possibilities here and now.44 For the same reason, one must distinguish between simple and complex eternal objects.45 That is, one can mentally construct a hierarchy of eternal objects, from the simplest to the most complex, depending upon their level of abstraction from the concrete individuality of any given physical reality. Finally, Whitehead distinguishes between finite and infinite hierarchies of eternal objects in terms of complexity. A finite hierarchy proper to some finite organism does not include all possible eternal objects, but an infinite hierarchy of eternal objects proper to a transcendent reality includes them all and thus is beyond the comprehension of any human being in his or her self-consciousness.46 In implicit accord with Bergson on this point, Whitehead here concedes that physical reality exceeds our human ability to comprehend it. This notion of a hierarchy of eternal objects allows Whitehead to deal with the role of God in his process-oriented philosophy. The term “God” does not reflect his religious convictions but only the need for a philosophical

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“Principle of Concretion,” a consistent way to reduce potentiality to actuality.47 That is, given all the theoretical possibilities for actualization that are available to a given self-constituting subject of experience, a further metaphysical principle is needed to reduce all those potentialities to a reasonable number for that subject of experience eventually to make a choice. This metaphysical principle is an underlying “substantial activity” operative within each finite subject of experience that reduces the sheer diversity of potential eternal objects available to it into some form of unity-in-diversity.48 “Restriction is the price of value. There cannot be value without antecedent standards of value, to discriminate the acceptance or rejection of what is before the envisaging mode of activity.”49 The actual choice of an eternal object or one set of dynamically interconnected eternal objects, however, must be made by the finite subject of experience. It has been an unfortunate mistake, says Whitehead, to attribute that choice to God instead of to the creature. For, if that is the case, then God must be viewed as the “origin of all evil as well as of all good” within the cosmic process.50 In the second to the last chapter, Whitehead has some interesting remarks about the proper relation between religion and science (as opposed to the relation between philosophy and science earlier). He first states that science and religion “are the two strongest general forces (apart from the mere impulse of the various senses) which influence men [sic], and they seem to be set one against the other.”51 Yet historically both science and religion have been in continual development. No educated person, for example, continues to believe in the theory of geocentrism even though it seems to be confirmed by a strictly literal reading of Biblical texts. Likewise, contemporary natural science has moved beyond the notion of the world as a cosmic machine as depicted by Newton in his cosmology. Hence, there would seem to be “wider truths and finer perspectives within which a reconciliation of a deeper religion and a more subtle science will be found.”52 Religion, in particular, “will not regain its old power until it can face change in the same spirit as does science. Its principles may be eternal, but the expression of those principles requires continual development. This evolution of religion is in the main a disengagement of its own proper ideas from the adventitious notions which have crept into it by reason of the expression of its own ideas in terms of the imaginative picture of the world entertained in previous ages.”53 Accordingly, far from being the adversary of religion, natural science with its contemporary understanding of the workings of the cosmic process can be and should be a great aid to religiously oriented people in the defense of their most cherished beliefs. Whitehead concludes: “The worship of God is not a rule of safety—it is an adventure of the spirit, a flight after the unattainable. The death of religion comes with the repression of the high hope of adventure.”54



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In the final chapter of the book, Whitehead sums up the goals and values of his philosophy of organism as opposed to the mechanistic approach to reality to be found in natural science from the time of Galileo onwards. He then recommends various changes in the mindset of contemporary human beings to continue to make “social progress.” As noted earlier, contemporary philosophy seems to be basically out of touch with the findings of natural science because of its preoccupation with psychology and the life of the mind.55 This is an inevitable consequence of acceptance of Descartes’s distinction between matter and mind. Instead, the organic unity of mind and body should be emphasized as symbolic of the dynamic relation between parts and whole within the cosmic process. Otherwise, there are quite serious consequences for life in contemporary society. “The doctrine of minds, as independent substances, leads directly not merely to private worlds of experience, but also to private worlds of morals.”56 For example, at the start of the Industrial Revolution in nineteenthcentury England this particular mindset led to ruthless aggression among industrialists for personal and corporate gain and to “a lack of reverence in the treatment of natural or artistic beauty.”57 Furthermore, the relative lack of attention to the enduring value of the whole for its role in assessing the relative value of the parts vis-a-vis one another has led to over­specialization in academics. That is, “[e]ach profession makes progress, but it is progress in its own groove.”58 One ends up living in a carefully chosen world of abstractions from reality in its fullness. Yet “[t]here is no substitute for the direct perception of the concrete achievement of a thing in its actuality.”59 What is needed in higher education, then, is an appreciation for art and aesthetics rather than ever-greater professionalism in a given discipline. “A static value, however, serious and important, becomes unendurable by its appalling monotony of existence. The soul cries aloud for release into change.”60 Just as with changes in religious doctrine and practice, so also with experiments in science and in the humanities, the true life of the spirit is an ongoing adventure, the exploration of new ideas and opportunities. Whitehead concludes: “Successful organisms modify their environment. Those organisms are successful which modify their environment so as to assist each other. This law is exemplified in nature on a vast scale.”61 Accordingly, successful human life in contemporary society should be modeled on the concept of physical reality as an organic totality of dynamically interconnected parts or members. PROCESS AND REALITY Whitehead offers in Process and Reality, “a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience

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30

can be interpreted.” It is the work of a logically trained mind that insists on consistency in matching his conceptual scheme with the details of ordinary human experience even as he simultaneously concedes that his scheme like all other metaphysical systems is provisional and therefore subject to revision.63 Given its broad scope, I focus on a single theme that was relatively neglected in Science and the Modern World, namely, Whitehead’s understanding of the relation between actual entities, the basic units of physical reality, and the nexuses and societies of which they are constituent parts or members. “‘Actual entities’—also termed ‘actual occasions’—are the final real things of which the world is made up. There is no going behind actual entities to find anything more real.”64 At the same time, actual entities are only momentary realities. Their only enduring value is to become constituents of entities that last—that is, nexuses or societies. A nexus is simply a coincidental succession of actual entities in time and space. A society is a nexus with “social order”—that is, a set of actual entities with a “common element of form,” a common pattern of existence and existence that has been successively inherited from one “duration” [time required for an actual entity to come to self-constitution or “satisfaction”].65 But what is a society in its own right as an ongoing series of events with a given mode of operation or “defining characteristic”? Here Whitehead is vague, perhaps he did not want to confuse what he meant by “society” with what Aristotle meant by “substance” in the latter’s Metaphysics.66 That is, Aristotle thought of substance as the agent or vital source of all its various forms of contingent activity; Whitehead conceived a society instead as the objective outcome of antecedent activity on the part of its dynamically interconnected constituents, namely, momentary selfconstituting subjects of experience: “The final facts are, all alike, actual entities; and these actual entities are drops of experience, complex and interdependent.”67 Yet, if a society exercises no agency proper to itself but only in and through the agency of its constituent actual entities.68 What is a society as an objective reality in and for itself? Even more fundamentally, what is the objective reality of a constituent actual entity? Whitehead says that the actual entity as initially a developing subject of experience becomes an object of “prehension” by subsequent actual entities, namely “one complex, fully determinate feeling.”69 Granted that there is a flow of feeling from an earlier subject of experience to a later one, how is it a determinate feeling? Whitehead’s explanation of how a subsequent subject of experience has initially physical feelings that are then combined with conceptual feelings via the Categories of Conceptual Valuation and Conceptual Reversion is quite involved.70 But these physical and conceptual feelings are rendered determinate by reference to the eternal object or set of eternal objects that is instantiated in the actual entity being prehended and in the society/societies of which it is a member. 62



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Whitehead seems to confirm this line of argument in the following passage out of the chapter on “The Order of Nature” in Process and Reality: The causal laws which dominate a social environment are the product of the defining characteristic [eternal object(s)] of that society, But the society is only efficient through its individual members. Thus in a society, the members can only exist by reason of the laws which dominate the society, and the laws only come into being by reason of the analogous character of the members of the society.71

The structured field of activity that constitutes a society as a thing in its own right is sustained by the ongoing interplay of its constituent actual entities. But these actual entities are themselves shaped in their individual processes of self-constitution by the corporate structure of the society that is already in place as a result of the dynamic interplay of predecessor constituent actual entities. This may seem to be an overly complicated explanation of the workings of physical reality. But, in fairness to Whitehead, one should realize that he is setting up concepts and principles for a world in evolution, not for a world with an already predetermined mode of operation (as in classical metaphysics). Furthermore, the proposal that Whiteheadian societies are structured fields of activity for ever-new sets of constituent actual entities fits well with Whitehead’s explanation of “structured societies, societies composed of sub-societies. in Process and Reality.72 That is, there are elementary and thus less organized societies that serve as the infrastructure for the gradual emergence of more complex and thus more intricately structured societies. The higher­order societies in turn provide further principles of operation for the workings of the lower-level societies within the structured society as a whole. Whitehead uses the example of a molecule at work within a living cell. The molecule retains its independent mode of operation within the cell but it is still constrained in its ongoing activity by the structures proper to the cell. The molecule is not as “free” as it would be if it were independent of life within a cell.73 A further question regarding the whole-part characteristic of Whiteheadian structured societies is, of course, whether these societies are not only hierarchically ordered fields of activity but also hierarchically ordered organisms in which some are elementary organisms (actual entities) and others are more complex organisms (living individuals, corporate institutions, physical environments) whose constituent parts or members are these lower-order organisms. This proposal still seems to be in accord with Whitehead’s notion of structured societies in Process and Reality and yet it could provide contemporary Whiteheadians with the conceptual backing they need to sustain Whitehead’s critique of scientific materialism in Science and the Modern World and in Process and Reality. Instead of agreeing with scientific

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materialists that everything reduces to matter in motion, Whiteheadians can instead claim with Whitehead that everything is alive. Even complex civic organizations like the United Nations, for example, can be compared to a mega-organism since its major constituents are human beings in dynamic interaction. Admittedly, Whitehead himself limits the notion of organism to actual entities as self­constituting subjects of experience. Only actual entities are empowered by what he calls “creativity,” the principle of activity in the cosmic process whereby “[t]he many become one, and are increased by one.”74 But societies, whether elementary or highly complex, are likewise composed of many individual components (interconnected energy-events) that through their dynamic interplay function as or become one—that is, a new higherorder, socially constituted reality. So logically societies should likewise be empowered and sustained in existence by creativity as the underlying principle of existence and activity in physical reality. Whitehead himself and many of his followers to this day would presumably reject this new line of argument on societies as organisms in their own right because it challenges Whitehead’s presupposition of philosophical atomism according to which only actual entities are “the final real things of which this world is made up.”75 The logical consequence of their reduction of the notion of organism to consecutive sets of momentary self-constituting subjects of experience, however, is that “society” in Whitehead’s metaphysical scheme (like the notion of “substance” in Aristotle’s metaphysics) is then devoid of further content that would be descriptive of something existing in its own right.76 In the same chapter on “The Order of Nature” in Process and Reality, for example, Whitehead claims: The point of a “society,” as the term is here used, is that it is self-sustaining; in other words, that it is its own reason. Thus a society is more than a set of entities to which the same class-name applies; that is to say, it involves more than a merely mathematical conception of “order.” To constitute a society, the class-name has got to apply to each member, by reason of genetic derivation from other members of that same society. The members of the society are alike because, by reason of their common character, they impose on other members of the society the conditions which lead to that likeness.77

The only entities that have genetically interrelated constituents, however, are organisms. Logically, then, Whitehead should be expressly saying that a society is an organism. But he never draws that conclusion since his focus in this passage is on the ongoing genetic relations between the constituent actual entities rather than on what they collectively produce, namely, a society as a self-sustaining reality that exists in its own right. Similarly, he is ambivalent about the metaphysical status of the term society in a later book, Adventures of Ideas. I cite the following passage out of this later text:



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A society has an essential character, whereby it is the society that it is, and it has also accidental qualities that vary as circumstances alter. Thus a society, as a complete existence and as retaining the same metaphysical status, enjoys a history expressing its changing reactions to changing circumstances.78

This is equivalently the definition of an Aristotelian substance. Whitehead concedes this point in a footnote: “This notion of ‘society’ has analogies to Descartes ‘notion of’ substance.”79 But he does not elaborate on the similarities between the two concepts. Instead, he proceeds to analyze the differences between nexuses of actual occasions that are purely temporal and nexuses that are also spatially extended. Human consciousness is an example of a temporally organized set of actual entities sharing a common element of form; an animal body is a set of actual entities that are both spatially and temporally organized. Accordingly, both human consciousness and animal bodies are organisms, although differently constituted and performing different functions. But nowhere in these pages does Whitehead specifically describe them as organisms—that is, entities that exist in their own right, even though he explicitly labels his metaphysical scheme as a philosophy of organism.80 By thus focusing on the dynamic relation between constituent actual entities instead of on the society as a functioning totality in its own right, Whitehead inadvertently downplays the key role of the defining characteristic or “common element of form” within a society.81 A defining characteristic or common element of form, of course, is not itself a momentary subject of experience but an objective structure representing the degree of self-organization for a given set of actual entities. Yet it is just as real as the actual entities that constitute it by their dynamic interaction. Whitehead erred then in claiming at the beginning of Process and Reality that actual entities are “the final real things of which the world is made up.”82 Societies with their distinctive common element of form are just as real as actual entities. For, as Whitehead admits in Adventures of Ideas, actual entities are transient realities, literally come and go, but societies with their defining characteristic or common element of form endure.83 In vaguely referring to “analogies” between the notions of “society” and “substance,” Whitehead missed the real point of comparison between them. A Whiteheadian society only resembles an Aristotelian substance insofar as both have an enduring identity (whether a corporate identity in virtue of the activity of its objective constituents or individual identity in virtue of its subjective agency). In the first chapter of the fifth and last part of Process and Reality, Whitehead initially notes the curiously complementary character of logical opposites (permanence and flux, order and novelty) in the cosmic process. This is especially the case for human beings with their heightened awareness of self and the surrounding world. One “craves for novelty and yet is haunted by

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terror at the loss of the past, with its familiarities and its loved ones.”84 Whitehead finds the reconciliation of these differing tendencies within physical reality in a religiously inspired understanding of the God-world relationship that he spells out in the next and last chapter of the book. Whitehead begins this last chapter with a brief commendation of Buddhism and other this-worldly cosmologies that conceive Ultimate Reality as a self-sustaining process empowered from within by an “unmoved mover” or unchanging principle of activity. For the same reason, he is quite critical of Christianity and Islam (“Mahometanism”) because of the belief in “an aboriginal, eminently real, transcendent creator, at whose fiat the world came into being, and whose imposed will it obeys.”85 Yet he still finds inspiration in the Biblical portrayal of Jesus of Nazareth who preached love of God and neighbor and sought to persuade rather than issue commands to his listeners.86 This understanding of God’s relation to creatures fits well with his claim earlier in Process and Reality that God empowers rather than overpowers or controls the self-constituting activity of actual entities. God only provides “initial aims” or rational alternatives to an actual entity for its own “decision” or “subjective aim.”87 Sometimes the divine initial aim may seem harsh in what it recommends (e.g., for a chain-smoker to give up smoking), but it is always for the long-term benefit of the society/societies to which the actual entity belongs and to whose well-being and survival the actual entity contributes. Thus far Whitehead’s understanding of the God-world relationship seems to be in accord both with the principles of his metaphysical scheme and with orthodox Christian belief. But divergences between these two authoritative sources soon come to the surface. For example, Whitehead claims from a philosophical perspective that “God and the World are the contrasted opposites in terms of which Creativity achieves its supreme task of transforming disjoined multiplicity with its diversities in opposition, into concrescent unity, with its diversities in contrast.”88 Admittedly, in Whitehead’s cosmology Creativity is an underlying activity for the cosmic process as a whole.89 It is not an individual entity that transcends the entitative reality of God. But in Whitehead’s metaphysical scheme God is only a component, albeit a key component, within the cosmic process, not its transcendent Creator or vital source. God is the principle of unity within the cosmic process; the World is its principle of multiplicity. There is thus an ongoing dialectical relationship between God and the World insofar as multiplicity is transformed into unity but only to be changed back into sheer multiplicity again in the next moment of the cosmic process: “God is the infinite ground of all mentality, the unity of vision seeking physical multiplicity. The World is the multiplicity of finite actualities seeking a perfected unity.”90 Even more unsettling for orthodox Christian belief, however, is the antecedent conviction on Whitehead’s part that every actual entity lives within



Living in a Dynamically Interconnected World 35

its subjective world and transforms its “prehensions” of other actual entities into a subjective unity proper to itself.91 Hence, when God as the principle of unity within the cosmic process transforms the multiplicity of the events that have just taken place in the World into a prehensive unity, that unity only exists within God as the sole nontemporal entity whose subjective process of self-constitution never ends. There is, in other words, no objective unity for the world as an ontological reality in itself that is different from God.92 Whitehead tries to soften the logical consequences of this line of thought with the following comment: “What is done in the world is transformed into a reality in heaven, and the reality in heaven passes back into the world. By reason of this reciprocal relation, the love in the world passes into the love in heaven, and floods back again into the world. God is the great companion— the fellow-sufferer who understands.”93 A genuine intersubjective relation, however, demands two subjects of experience, both of which continue to exist over time. But in Whitehead’s cosmology, there is only one subject of experience that endures, that never reaches “satisfaction.”94 Thomas Aquinas, in his articulation of the Christian God-world relationship in the Summa theologiae, faced a similar issue. As Subsistent Being or Pure Actuality (the Christian counterpart to Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover), God cannot change, thus cannot have a genuine intersubjective relation with creatures. Aquinas maintains that God shows mercy to creatures. But, in showing mercy to creatures in their suffering, God is principally acting out of the divine Goodness, not out of heartfelt feeling for suffering creatures.95 Neither Whitehead nor Aquinas, therefore, were logically in a position to incorporate the reciprocal causality of a genuine I-Thou relationship into their respective presentations of the God-world relationship. In the next chapter, however, I present a systems-oriented approach to physical reality in which reciprocal causality between subjects of experience is a key factor. NOTES   1.  Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, Corrected Eel., eels. David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978), 18.   2. Alfred North and Bertrand Russell, Principia Mathematica, 3 vols. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1910–1913).  3. Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the Modern World (New York: Free Press, 1967), 4.  4. Ibid., 3.  5. Ibid., 8.  6. Ibid., 5.  7. Ibid., 18.  8. Ibid., 20.  9. Ibid., 26–28. 10.  Ibid., 32.

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11.  Ibid., 34–36. 12.  Ibid., 46–47. 13.  Ibid., 49. 14.  Ibid., 54. 15.  Ibid., 64–65. 16.  Ibid., 68. 17.  Ibid., 69. 18.  Ibid., 70. 19.  Ibid., 73. 20.  Ibid., 87–88. 21.  Ibid., 91. 22.  Ibid., 95. 23.  Ibid., 98. 24.  Ibid., 99–101. 25.  Ibid., 103. 26.  Ibid., 107. 27.  Ibid., 108. 28.  Ibid., 109. 29.  Ibid., 110. 30.  Ibid., 111. 31.  Ibid., 114. 32.  Ibid., 117–18. 33.  Ibid., 119, 123. 34.  Ibid., 121–22. 35.  Ibid., 120, 125. 36.  Ibid., 131. 37. Ibid. 38.  Ibid., 136. 39.  Ibid., 141. 40.  Ibid., 144–45. 41.  Ibid., 149. 42.  Ibid., 168. 43.  Ibid., 159–60. 44.  Ibid., 162–63. 45.  Ibid., 166–67. 46.  Ibid., 169–70. 47.  Ibid., 174. 48.  Ibid., 177. 49.  Ibid., 178. 50.  Ibid., 179. 51.  Ibid., 181–82. 52.  Ibid., 185. 53.  Ibid., 189. See also Granville Henry, Christianity and the Images of Science (Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys, 1998). Henry also argues that religion can benefit from new discoveries in science since religious belief is best understood if expressed in the idiom of whatever world view is generally accepted. 54. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 192. 55.  Ibid., 193–94. 56.  Ibid., 195–96. 57.  Ibid., 166. 58.  Ibid., 197. 59.  Ibid., 199. 60.  Ibid., 202. 61.  Ibid., 205. 62. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 3. 63.  Ibid., 4. 64.  Ibid., 18.



Living in a Dynamically Interconnected World 37

65.  Ibid., 25–26. 66.  Aristotle’s Metaphysics, trans. Hippocrates G. Apostle (Grinne ll, IA: Peripatetic Press, 1979), 1028a–1028b. 67. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 18. 68.  Ibid., 31. 69.  Ibid., 26–27. 70.  Ibid., 248–50. 71.  Ibid., 90–91. 72.  Ibid., 99–100. 73.  Ibid., 99. 74.  Ibid., 21. 75.  Ibid., 18, 35. 76.  Ibid., 78–79. 77.  Ibid., 89. 78. Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: Free Press, 1967), 204. 79.  Ibid., 204, n. 4. 80. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 7. 81. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 206. 82. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 18. 83. Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas, 204. 84. Whitehead Process and Reality, 340. 85.  Ibid., 342. 86.  Ibid., 343. 87.  Ibid., 244. 88.  Ibid., 348. 89.  Ibid., 7. 90.  Ibid., 348–49. 91.  Ibid., 22–23; see also Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 69–70. 92. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 350–51. 93.  Ibid., 351. 94.  Ibid., 25–26. 95.  Aquinas, Summa theologiae: I, Q. 9, art. 1.

Chapter Three

Living in a World of Open-Ended Systems

Bergson and Whitehead believed that the ultimate constituents of physical reality are not inanimate things. That is, everything that exists is upon closer investigation a dynamic unity of actively engaged parts or members. Whitehead, in particular, believed that physical reality is organized in terms of a hierarchy of organisms with more elementary and less organized organisms serving as the infrastructure of more complex and more integrated organisms. Most complex organisms in turn then serve as the super-structure or higher-order principle of organization for the elementary organisms. Yet neither Bergson nor Whitehead seems to have paid much attention as a result to their new vision of reality as corporately organized. That is, if the ultimate units of physical reality are organisms, whether large or small, then the world is primarily constituted by systems of entities in dynamic interaction rather than simply by individual entities in dynamic interaction. For every organism is an enduring system of dynamically interconnected parts or members; it thus exists in its own right as a corporate whole, a unified totality. Moreover, an organism renews or reorganizes itself in continuous exchange with other organisms and the external environment. For all these reasons, physical reality is definitely not a machine, an assembly of inanimate parts or members contrived by human beings to perform pre-determined tasks or to achieve predesigned goals or values. Admittedly, in common-sense experience, a human being certainly seems to be an individual entity, not a normally functioning system of lower-order entities. But, looked at more carefully, a human being is indeed a higherorder system of hierarchically ordered subsystems. There is, for example, ongoing interaction between the mind and the body as major subsystems within the human being as an organically organized reality. The various 39

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parts of the human body (organs, muscle, skin, etc.) are likewise subsystems coordinated to function together as an ongoing unity. Even body cells and their component molecules are subsystems, unities of still smaller organisms or systems (atoms). Furthermore, human beings are themselves subsystems within even larger corporate systems: the family; the local community; regional, national, and international communities; and other economic, political, and cultural organizations, institutions, and corporations. We human beings and all the other organisms in this world are thus born, live our lives, and die within the context of broader corporate realities or systems that existed before us and that will survive us. Hence, even though we rightly prize our individuality, what makes us different from other human beings, the deeper meaning and significance of our lives, is grounded not simply in who we are as individuals and what we accomplish on our own, but much more in what we do for and with other human beings to foster the common good, the ongoing well-being of the world in which we live. Yet many human beings, at least in contemporary Western civil society, feel uneasy in reaction to that last statement. For them, human life is highly competitive. Everyone aims at “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” but material resources to achieve those goals seem to be always in short supply. Hence, there is always a struggle to get one’s fair share, if not a little more than one’s fair share, simply to prove to oneself and others that one is a winner, not a loser, in the high-stakes game of modern life. But from the perspective of a systems-oriented approach to reality, such overly self-centered behavior is counterproductive. Systems only work well if all the constituent parts or members collaborate to bring into existence and then sustain what the system is designed to produce or make happen. Being overly concerned with one’s gain from participation in the system jeopardizes not only the proper working of the system but even of one’s good. As Benjamin Franklin allegedly said after signing the Declaration of Independence in 1776, “We must, indeed, all hang together or, most assuredly, all hang separately.” Yet amply justified concerns about how to protect one’s interests and desires within a given system still remain even after one, in theory, recognizes the value of collaborating with others to achieve common goals and values. For, as we shall see here, systems-oriented thinking unless carefully monitored tends to be deterministic—that is, goal-oriented to a fault. Especially the designers of humanly devised systems can be strongly tempted to make it work to their advantage instead of for the common good. Hence, one can reasonably be suspicious of being victimized by the designers of systems even as one unselfishly dedicates oneself to the task of bringing into existence and sustaining a system. Yet, while humanly contrived systems are goal-oriented from the start, systems already at work in the world of nature at least seem to be in varying degrees far more indeterminate, spontaneous,



Living in a World of Open-Ended Systems 41

and unpredictable. Otherwise, the historical growth of the cosmic process both in size and in complexity since the Big Bang would very likely not have happened. Other explanations for the growth in size and complexity of the cosmic process, of course, can still be provided. For example, an external source (e.g., a Creator God) may have predesigned the workings of the cosmic process from beginning to end to satisfy personal goals and values. Admittedly, pure chance in bringing about order and intelligibility within the cosmic process seems unlikely, given its size and complexity. But a third option makes more sense, namely, that some form of spontaneity or indeterminacy is present in physical reality at all its different levels of existence and activity, even at the level of atoms and their subatomic components. Philosophical atomism, as we saw in chapter 2, is unable to explain the emergence of life from nonliving components or (in more general terms) a working relationship between matter and spirit. For, an immaterial organizing principle would seem to be needed to sustain an internal unity between strictly material parts or components from moment to moment. Admittedly, in common-sense experience, it is often hard to distinguish between what is alive and what is inert or dead. To be alive is to change, however slowly. But change in size and structure can be so gradual as to escape ordinary human perception from moment to moment. Only over time does one belatedly realize that change has taken place (as in the everyday experience of aging). Given these preliminary reflections on the notion of system, I divide this chapter into two parts. In the first part, I review the historical development of the notion of system as first principle or paradigm for understanding the organization of physical reality. Along the way, I offer comments about whether the system in question is by design deterministic or left openended in its mode of operation. In the second part of the chapter, I present my argument: (a) that systems in the world of nature are in varying degrees open-ended or indeterminate, and (b) that humanly contrived systems work far better in achieving the goal desired if allowance is made for a certain amount of spontaneity or contingency on the part of the constituents of the system. SYSTEM AS A NEW PARADIGM FOR THE UNDERSTANDING OF REALITY Alexander Bogdanov (1873–1928) was one of the key figures in the formation of the Russian Communist Party in 1903 and a rival to Vladimir Lenin for its leadership. At the same time, he was active in academic life, specializing in medicine and psychiatry, and founded a new scientific discipline that he called Tektology.1 This new academic discipline aimed to systematize the human experience of physical reality through discovery of universal

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organizational principles. The basic unit of reality for him is what he called a complex, namely, an entity that both reflects the conditions of the environment in which is located and actively adapts its internal self-constitution to it.2 Hence, for Bogdanov a complex functions very much like an organism in its organized relation to its environment. His logical successor, Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901–1972), was an Austrian biologist who is considered to be the founder of General Systems Theory, namely, the interdisciplinary study of systems, whether natural or man-made. As Bertalanffy envisioned it, the purpose of general systems theory is to discover the dynamics, constraints, conditions, and functional principles of system: “systems theory is a broad view which far transcends technological problems and demands, a reorientation that has become necessary in science in general and in the gamut of disciplines from physics and biology to the behavioral and social sciences and to philosophy.”3 For example, there are real systems, entities perceived in or inferred from observation, and existing independently of an observer; conceptual systems, logic, mathematics and music; and, third, abstracted systems, scientific hypotheses about the nature of physical reality.4 Finally, there are open systems and closed systems: closed systems function like machines; open systems function like organisms. “The organism is not a static system closed to the outside and always containing the identical components; it is an open system in a (quasi-) steady state, maintained constant in its mass relations in a continuous change of component material and energies, in which material continually enters from, and leaves into, the outside environment.”5 Yet all these systems are operative in basically the same way, following the same broad principles of organization. The Hungarian philosopher of science, Ervin László (1932– ), maintains that the basic units of physical reality are systems, whether natural or artificial (humanly constructed).6 His focus over the years, however, has been on natural systems which he defines as follows: “a nonrandom accumulation of matter-energy in a region of physical space-time, which is nonrandomly organized into coacting interrelated subsystems or components.”7 Furthermore, in László’s view, physical reality is structured by a hierarchy of natural systems with lower-order systems serving as infrastructure for higher-order systems, and the latter providing further operational principles or superstructure for lower-order systems. In this way, László provides a systems-oriented explanation for all the different levels of existence and activity within the cosmic process from atoms to molecules, from molecules to cells, organisms and thence to communities and physical environments. László also speculates that even more comprehensive systems govern the clustering of stars into galaxies and sets of galaxies with one another.8 To deal with a vast hierarchy of systems, László further reconceived what he means by natural systems, namely, as interconnected energy fields and the



Living in a World of Open-Ended Systems 43

events constantly taking place within them. In his book The Connectivity Hypothesis, for example, he divides physical reality into two “domains”: “One is the manifest domain of (directly or instrumentally) observable particles and systems of particles; the other the virtual domain of the cosmic plenum, the energy sea from which the particles arise, with which they interact, and into which they ultimately fall back.”9 The entities of the manifest domain are particles, systems of particles, and higher-order systems of systems of particles, akin to Whitehead’s notion of actual entities, societies, and structured societies.10 Charged particles and the systems formed of them are internally related to each other and to the rest of the universe. “They are what they are because they receive (a) vectorial-energy signals from other particles and particle-systems in their surroundings, and (b) nonvectorial ‘in-formation’ regarding the state of particles and systems of particles throughout the universe.”11 In Science and the Reenchantment of the Cosmos, László links the cosmic plenum with the Hindu term Akasha, namely, “an all-encompassing medium that underlies all things, the medium that becomes all things. It is real, but so subtle that it cannot be perceived until it becomes the many things that populate the manifest world.”12 Finally, in Science and the Akashic Field, László makes clear what he means by “in-formation” as opposed to information in the conventional sense: “In-formation is a subtle, quasi-instant, non-evanescent and non-energetic connection between things at different locations in space and events at different points in time. . . . In-formation links things (particles, atoms, molecules, organisms, ecologies, solar systems, entire galaxies, as well as the mind and consciousness associated with some of those things) regardless of how far they are from each other and how much time has passed since connections were created between them.”13 Hence, the field proper to “in-formation” underlies the gravitational field, the electromagnetic field, and the Higgs boson field. It is responsible for nonlocal coherence in the universe as a whole. Norbert Wiener (1894–1964) was professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is considered to be the founder of cybernetics, namely, the way that both human beings and machines process information through a feedback mechanism of stimulus and response. That is, information is received from the external environment, carefully analyzed, and then used to modify the environment in terms of a predetermined mode of operation (in the case of machines, through conscious human design). Weiner learned the fundamentals of feedback mechanisms during World War II by studying how electronic devices can be used to change the position and direction of a guided missile in flight. But he soon realized that a similar stimulus-response feedback is at work in all living entities, beginning with plant life. Every organism, large or small, adjusts to its external environment and modifies it as needed for its own survival and well-being. This research on feedback mechanisms within living entities and humanly

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contrived machines culminated in the publication of Wiener’s ground-breaking book, Cybernetics, in 1948.14 The similarity between human beings and machines in terms of information processing and control of the environment, however, eventually resulted in a new scientific discipline called Artificial Intelligence. The term was coined by John McCarthy (1927–2011), assistant professor of mathematics at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. Machines (e.g., computers) can be designed to mimic the workings of the human mind in learning and problemsolving. Some machines even recognize and in some measure respond to feelings as well as cognitive issues. Hence, mathematically regulated systems would seem to function as well or better than human beings in many scientific disciplines. Yet these cybernetic systems are mechanistic in their mode of operation. They employ a closed feedback mechanism in which information can never increase except via information externally fed into it by external sources (ultimately, human beings). In open or living systems, however, increase of order and decrease of entropy is possible, given the laws of thermodynamic systems. That is, an open system may internally tend toward a state of higher-order or lower-order organization, owing to current conditions in the system.15 Still another systems-oriented approach to reality was taken by Niklas Luhmann (1927–1998), a prominent German sociologist and philosopher of social sciences who focused on the objectivity or rule-governed context of observable events rather than on how they are produced by human beings and machines. Human beings or machines are simply the sine qua non conditions for the operation of an objective system.16 Luhmann thus has in mind systems that acquire and then maintain a specific identity based on a process called “autopoiesis” (literally, self-creation). That is, the systems are operationally closed in that they include only those events taking place in the environment that directly affect the ongoing mode of operation of the system; everything else is excluded. Yet Luhmann allows for “structural coupling”—that is, “a state in which two systems shape the environment of the other in such a way that both depend upon the other for continuing their autopoiesis and increasing their structural complexity.”17 He aims to set up the rules for an objective problem-solving approach to physical reality that would apply to a wide variety of systems, irrespective of their differences from one another. What he especially has in mind here are self-referential systems, namely, systems that can establish relations with themselves and to differentiate those relations from relations with their environment.18 Self-referential systems, however, are nonpsychic; their components are “elements” with objective relations to one another in virtue of the structure of the system.19 Hence, “systems must create and employ a description of themselves; they must be able to see the difference between system and environment within themselves, for orientation and as a principle for creating information.”20 How such elaborate



Living in a World of Open-Ended Systems 45

self-reference is possible without some form of intersubjective communication among the components of the system is not discussed. Other systems-oriented thinkers could be named.21 But at this point, it is time to present my argument for an open-ended systems approach to reality based on the metaphysical presupposition that the ultimate constituents of physical reality are momentary self-constituting subjects of experience or mini-organisms that by their dynamic interrelation from moment to moment co-constitute the corporate reality of larger or more complex organisms (both individual entities and corporate institutions). OPEN-ENDED SYSTEMS AND UNIVERSAL INTERSUBJECTIVITY As noted earlier, there are two kinds of systems: those that are closed or purely mechanical in their mode of operation, and those that are open-ended and thus capable of gradual evolution from a less complex to a more complex level of existence and activity. Humanly designed systems are closed or deterministic because human beings create them to achieve quite specific goals and values. Systems in the world of nature, however, are for the most part open-ended and capable of internal evolution because otherwise the world as we know it would never have come into being. That is, the “Big Bang” at the beginning of the cosmic process was presumably an enormous burst of energy but nothing more. Everything since then has been the result of cosmic evolution—that is, thirteen billion years in which organized groups or systems of individual entities experimented with obstacles to survival and further development. Admittedly, many such systems at work in physical reality, especially those at the atomic and molecular levels of existence and activity, appear to be deterministic, with little or no variation in their anticipated mode of operation. But, as Whitehead comments in Science and the Modern World, this assumption is an example of “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness.”22 That is, one is unconsciously substituting a set of equations for concrete details of whatever physical reality one is investigating. Yet, upon closer observation, a high degree of dynamic interaction seems to exist at the quantum level of existence and activity within nature.23 As a result, Jesper Hoffmeyer, emeritus professor of biology at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, proposes in his theory of biosemiotics that information is traded between components at the molecular and all higher-order levels of existence and activity within physical reality.24 Perhaps an exchange of information likewise takes place at the atomic level as well. For, atoms are likewise ongoing unities of self-organizing subjects of experience (subatomic events). Otherwise, it is hard to explain how completely inanimate constituents at the atomic level combine to produce a molecule with

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life-like properties. But, as I explain next, the tendency of scientists in the life sciences is simply to prescind from that philosophical question to note more carefully how something happens and under what empirical conditions. For, philosophers of science themselves do not agree on how and why this happens. Ervin László, for example, contends that in a systems-oriented approach to reality only systems exist, hence, that components of systems are in fact even more elementary systems. I instead agree with Whitehead that momentary self-constituting subjects of experience are the agents of change and thus the ultimate constituents of physical reality. For, only subjects of experience (actual entities) exercise efficient causality—that is, bring about the transition from potentiality to actuality at every moment.25 Yet, insofar as these dynamically interrelated subjects of experience co-constitute an objective reality other than themselves as momentary energy events, they indirectly share in the formal causality proper to the system as an organic reality or qualitative whole greater than the sum of its parts. By the same token, the system as a functioning organism shares in the efficient causality of its constituents, momentary self-constituting subjects of experience, in shaping and reshaping the governing structure from moment to moment. A reciprocal causal relation thereby governs their ongoing interaction, not the unilateral causality between cause-and-effect as in classical metaphysics. Admittedly, this may seem to be a fine point in my argument. But upon closer inspection, it makes clear the difference between natural systems and humanly designed systems. Systems in the world of nature are alive because their components are alive—that is, becoming something more than and intrinsically other than themselves as agents of change. Humanly conceived systems, on the contrary, are inanimate and deterministic because their components are inert and thus unchanging objects of thought, concepts in a hypothesis. I only disagree with Whitehead’s presupposition of philosophical atomism and as a result his rejection of the notion of intersubjectivity among actual entities as constituents of societies.26 For, actual entities are by definition transient events; they do not exist in and for themselves. They exist for the sake of the society from which they emerged and to which they contribute their pattern of activity or mode of operation as a “superject” or transient event. But this cannot happen unless actual entities can reciprocally influence one another’s growth and development. Whitehead himself seems paradoxical to confirm that statement in a citation from a later book Adventures of Ideas. “[I]n a society, the members can only exist by reason of the laws which dominate the society, and the laws only come into being by reason of the analogous characters of the members of the society.”27 Thus there is a reciprocal causal relation between the society as an objective reality with its higher-order structure or mode of operation and its constituent actual entities that by their dynamic interrelation from moment to moment sustain the structure and mode of operation of the society



Living in a World of Open-Ended Systems 47

as a whole. The pattern proper to the whole influences the pattern proper to each of the parts and vice versa.28 Hence, as an internally constituted reality, a society should be an entity in its own right that is derivative from the interplay of its constituents but not dependent on them for its existence and activity.29 . As noted previously, Whitehead is not clear in his explanation of the reciprocal relation between actual entities and the society to which they belong. For, he seems to claim that a newly concrescing actual entity does not directly prehend the structure of the society to which it belongs. Instead, it prehends a cluster of antecedently existing actual entities and seeks the nexus or pattern that links them all together so that it alone can now choose for itself its pattern of self-constitution.30 Here too, of course, he unconsciously focuses on the agency of the parts and not on the society or system itself to which they belong as the source of their meaning and value as momentary subjects of experience.31 Creativity as the principle of novelty within the cosmic process should by his admission be considered the key agent of change even though creativity itself remains only a transcendent activity, and thus is not a transcendent entity (e.g., a Creator God).32 Moreover, the notion of organism is much more attractive than the notion of substance or individual entity in classical metaphysics since it applies to many more types of entities within physical reality than substance (e.g., communities, physical environments, economic corporations, government institutions). Admittedly, Whitehead as a practicing scientist denied the possibility of intersubjectivity between actual entities, given the lapse of time needed for actual entities as momentary subjects of experience to receive information from one another and to respond to it.33 Yet based on commonsense experience I still defend the notion of universal intersubjectivity. For, contemporary actual entities do not exist in their own right but only as members of societies that are contemporaneous with one another. Hence, given the rapidity of the succession of constituent actual entities within a given society, two human beings engaged in dialogue with one another have good reason to believe that they enjoy a mutual intersubjective relation not only during the actual moment of dialogue with one another but even afterward as a result of that conversation and others similar to it. They have co-created a We-relation that is more than and other than simply the reality of the I and the Thou taken separately. Here I only assume that something similar is presumably happening at nonhuman levels of existence and activity when the constituents of two or more societies co-create an objective reality greater than themselves simply as individual subjects of experience. Here too the precision of scientific reflection seems to falter in the face of common-sense experience. Admittedly, many contemporary natural scientists have reason to be skeptical on this point. That is, in their view, the contingency at work in the

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world of nature can be nicely explained in terms of the number and diversity of individual entities at a key moment in an otherwise totally random engagement with one another.34 In 1995, for example, Stuart Kauffman, professor of biochemistry and expert in the analysis of complex computer systems, published At Home in the Universe in which he studied computer models of the unexpected emergence of proto-cells from inanimate molecules, given a sufficient amount of diversity and dynamic interaction.35 Yet he offered no philosophical explanation of how this happens. Ex nihilo, nihil fit. Admittedly, in Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason and Religion, Kauffman later claimed that there is an immanent principle of selforganization within the physical universe that moves the cosmic process to progressively higher levels of size and complexity.36 He called this principle “creativity,” perhaps in imitation of Whitehead’s notion of creativity as the principle of novelty within the cosmic process. But Kauffman did not inquire about the ontological source of creativity—that is, where its energy comes from. That is, it is simply part of the normal workings of nature, given proper circumstances? Or is creativity instead derivative from an outside source (e.g., the Biblical Creator God) and, if so, how is it transmitted from God to creatures?37 Finally, in an even more recent book A World Beyond Physics, Kauffman explains the emergence of life out of inanimate components in virtue of what he calls “Constraint Closure”38 The latter is “a set of both constraints on the release of energy in non-equilibrium processes, and those processes [themselves], such that the system constructs its own constraints.”39 Kauffman concludes: “Such a system is a ‘whole’ and more than the sum of its parts. . . . It is a Kantian whole, with parts that exist for and by means of the whole.”40 For example, the proper function of the human heart is to pump blood for the benefit of the human body. Functions only exist, of course, in terms of organically constituted parts and wholes.41 But later in the book he still persists in attributing the origin of life to molecular diversity—that is, a chance or strictly contingent combination of the right number and sufficient diversity of molecules.42 Terrence Deacon, professor of anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, published in 2012 Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter in which he too analyzes the notion of constraint in the ongoing relations between interrelated systems. To his credit, he at least recognizes the philosophical implications of his theory in comparison with the matterform composition of physical reality in Aristotelian metaphysics. “Being alive does not merely consist in being composed in a particular way. It consists in changing in a particular way.”43 But, if so, then change does not come about from the top-down as in a change of substantial form in Aristotelian metaphysics, but from the bottom-up through the mutual constraints that overlapping systems place on one another’s customary activity.



Living in a World of Open-Ended Systems 49

Yet there is an even bigger philosophical issue at stake in Deacon’s explanation of the constraints at work in the emergence of higher-order lifesystems out of lower-order systems with inanimate components. It lies in his somewhat paradoxical definition of constraint: “constraints are what is not there but could have been, irrespective of whether this is registered by any act of observation.”44 In other words, with the imposition of a constraint on the workings of a system, it loses some of its ability to function differently. This is close to nominalism, as Deacon himself admits, since the causal activity of a constraint is defined simply in terms of what it does not affect instead of in terms of what it does effect.45 Yet, argues Deacon, systems work more efficiently if they are thus constrained in the range of what they can do. But in any case, there is no direct causal agency at work here. For example, two deterministic systems, when brought into contact with one another, end up putting constraints on one another’s normal mode of operation.46 The result is often but not always the emergence of what Deacon calls a “contragrade process,” a higher-order, more complex system with other more conventional “orthograde” processes as its components or subsystems. In this way thermodynamic systems regularly give rise to morphodynamic systems that have a “tendency to become spontaneously more organized and orderly over time due to constant perturbation, but without the extrinsic imposition of influences that specifically impose that regularity.”47 What Deacon wants to rule out here is any kind of top-down causality in which an Aristotelian substantial form imposes order and intelligibility on inactive material components. The causation in the emergence of a more complex system has to be bottom-up in terms of the objective constraints that two (or more) less complex systems indirectly impose on one another in virtue of their being coincidentally combined. But Deacon misses a key point. Systems as such are “things,” the products of change on the part of their subjectively constituted components (“actual entities) to make things or systems happen in a certain way. Bottom-up causality (as opposed to top-down causality in classical metaphysics), in other words, begins with the most elementary component parts or members, not with some intermediate reality (e.g., the substantial form in classical metaphysics). This hypothesis is also compatible with the notion of a reciprocal relationship between actual entities and the societies to which they belong in the key passage out of Whitehead’s Process and Reality cited earlier.48 It is also what I had in mind earlier in this chapter with the notion of reciprocal causation between parts and wholes whereby the plan of the whole is reflected in the mode of operation of the constituents even as these same constituents originally gave rise to and now sustain the whole as an objective reality other than the constituents themselves in their intersubjective relation to one another. But Deacon cannot admit the viability of this proposal because of his antecedent conviction that the components of systems are inanimate and

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thus incapable of responsiveness to one another.49 In his view, life and mind should not be explained through explicit or implicit reference to underlying quantum-level processes “that appear to violate our familiar notions of cause and effect.”50 Jesper Hoffmeyer, however, emeritus professor of biology at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, proposes in his theory of biosemiotics that information is indeed traded between components at the molecular and all higher-order levels of existence and activity within physical reality.51 Yet, for him as well as for Deacon, the components of molecules, namely, atoms, remain strictly inanimate entities. Atoms, however, are likewise composed of dynamically interrelated parts or members (subatomic particles). Hence, they too would seem to be for that reason mini-organisms. Accordingly, Hoffmeyer, Kauffman, and Deacon face the same logical dilemma without success, namely, how inanimate components produce a totally different entity—that is, something that is alive. But are they then putting more trust in the abstract logic of their mathematical equations than in the careful examination of all the empirical data thereby involved? For example, are they ignoring the otherwise puzzling results of scientific research in the field of quantum mechanics to focus on what is empirically measurable in terms of the interaction of inanimate entities with one another, what Whitehead refers to as the fallacy of misplaced concreteness (see also, chapter 2)? For, there is good reason to think that the evolution of life is a far more complex issue than the theory of natural selection as originally proposed by Charles Darwin and then modified by neo-Darwinians with the discovery of the gene and its role in transmitting DNA from one generation to another would seem to allow. Evelyn Fox Keller, for example, in her book The Century of the Gene makes clear how scientific understanding of the nature and function of the gene has significantly changed. Genes evolve in response to one another within the genome and in response to changing environmental conditions.52 Likewise, natural scientists increasingly recognize that not just genes but entire organisms adapt to and change their physical environment in much the same way that human beings create cultural “niches” for their ongoing survival and continued prosperity.53 Similarly, Simon Conway Morris, the English paleontologist and evolutionary biologist, claims that roughly the same principles of internal self-organization seem to be present in the evolutionary growth and development of widely different plant and animal species.54 Nature, in other words, seems to exhibit a tendency to habittaking—that is, using the same method for ongoing growth and development until something even better turns up. Terrence Deacon in Incomplete Nature also referred to a “habit-taking tendency” in nature, a term that he borrowed from the evolutionary cosmology of Charles Sanders Peirce without taking account of Peirce’s other belief that “mind” or subjectivity in some sense is present at all levels of existence and reality within nature.55 Finally, John



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Gribbin finds evidence of habit-taking in the way that consistent structural patterns (Mandelbrot fractals) can be found at various levels of existence and activity within physical reality.56 Accordingly, Thomas Nagel, University Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University, contests the presupposition of most natural scientists that the ultimate units of physical reality are inanimate entities, atoms in the classical sense. Rather, an appeal should be made to a teleological understanding of physical reality. That is, the universe is rationally governed “not only through the universal quantitative laws of physics that underlie efficient causation, but also through principles which imply that things happen because they are on a path that leads toward certain outcomes—notably, the existence of living, and ultimately of conscious, organisms.”57 Nagel and the other philosophers and scientists cited earlier, however, do not explicitly claim with Whitehead that the ultimate constituents of physical reality are momentary self-constituting subjects of experience (actual entities). For them, that would presumably be a “step too far,” at least right now.58 In the final analysis, of course, there will always be at least three possibilities for the emergence of life and mind within the cosmic process. (1) Life is the result of a strictly fortuitous set of circumstances. (2) Life appeared within the cosmic process in virtue of a predesigned plan on the part of an external agent (e.g., a Creator God). (3) Life has never been completely absent from the cosmic process. I favor the third alternative because it lends itself to a creative balance between chaos and determinism in the workings of the cosmic process. Furthermore, the third alternative also suggests that the notion of universal intersubjectivity and reciprocal causation among the constituents of systems applies not only to the workings of the social order for human beings and other higher-order animal species but also in principle to the mode of operation of systems everywhere in physical reality. Everything in this world is intimately connected with everything else in a way that would be physically impossible in a world of unchanging individual things. Furthermore, the other two alternatives seem to involve logical inconsistencies. For, if one appeals to chance to explain how evolution takes place, there is little or no guarantee of consistency and predictability in the cosmic process. In principle, anything can happen. Natural scientists like Kauffman and Deacon offer arguments for the emergence of increased order and eventually progressively higher forms of life based on statistical probability. But statistical probability only calculates what is likely to happen next; unlike the laws of nature in Newtonian physics, it cannot predict what de facto will happen. The second alternative, on the contrary, lends itself to theological determinism since a divine plan for the cosmic process would necessarily be oriented to the achievement of very specific goals and values that are compatible with belief in divine power and goodness.

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Christian philosophers and theologians, of course, might well claim that Divine Providence is clearly not deterministic since out of regard for human freedom of choice God does not predetermine human beings to do only what is right but finds ways to adjust to the reality of moral evil within the overall plan of Divine Providence.59 For similar reasons, God allows natural evils to happen. Preserving the integrity of the laws of nature is more important in the eyes of God. But, even given this benign understanding of the workings of Divine Providence, one still has to reconcile God’s primary causality with the secondary causality exercised by human beings and other sentient creatures. Thomas Aquinas, for example, reduces the secondary causality of creatures, even human beings, to be instruments of the divine will.60 As a result, the third alternative seems to be the most reasonable option to explain the emergence of life and mind within the cosmic process. Some limited form of subjectivity must have been at work in the cosmic process from the Big Bang onwards. Whether that is in fact the case cannot be empirically established. But it still provides a more plausible explanation for the shift from potentiality to actuality among individual entities at all levels of existence and activity within physical reality. That is, every entity is in some measure Causa sui, self-creative. But its capacity for creativity is limited, depending upon the degree of subjectivity or internal self-organization that the entity possesses. For example, atoms and molecules exercise minimum creativity in reaffirming or perpetuating the same governing structure or mode of operation of its predecessors in the system to which they all belong. At higher levels of existence and activity within nature, however, considerable creativity is needed for organisms to keep a proper balance between order and chaos in making the transition from potentiality to actuality at every moment. Finally, when human beings must consciously weigh alternative courses of action to make the right decision at any given moment, creativity in the world of nature reaches its highest peak.61 Indirect confirmation of that last statement is provided by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann in their book The Social Construction of Reality: “Social order exists only as a product of human activity. . . . Both in its genesis (social order is the result past human activity) and its existence in any instant of time (social order exists only and insofar as human activity continues to produce it) it is a human product.”62 Hence, human beings can change the workings of the various systems at work in their lives, especially if they organize and take collective action against unjust social structures. These humanly constructed systems are not deterministic; they can be altered if human beings think creatively and act accordingly. If systems stay in place even after they are judged to be ineffective or even unjust, it is ultimately because the population at large did not organize sufficiently to compel changes against the will of those minority groups who currently profit from the current system.



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In my view, natural systems at work in physical reality are also nondeterministic because they too have parts or members in opposition to one another with the result that the system is at least in some measure open-ended rather than deterministic. Admittedly, these parts or members of natural systems are not conscious, much less self-conscious, in their interaction with one another but they still possess some measure of subjectivity, responsiveness to one another and to their environment. Natural scientists like Kauffman, Deacon and Hoffmeyer concede as much when they describe autocatalysis and autopoiesis as intimately involved in the evolutionary process. Kauffman even talks about an immanent principle of self-organization in natural systems. But these scientists still regard systems in nature as deterministic because in their view the basic constituents of these systems are inanimate entities with purely mechanical relations to one another. But it is equally plausible, as I see it, to claim from a philosophical perspective that the basic constituents of natural systems are mini-organisms within the system that is itself a more complex organism. On this last point, however, I differ from both Whitehead and these scientists. That is, Whitehead claims that the constituents of societies (actual entities) do not exercise intersubjective relations with one another, given their existence as momentary self-constituting subjects of experience. I argue instead that Whitehead is inadvertently thinking here of purely quantitative wholes in which the parts or members have no internal relation to one another but simply add up to produce a numerical whole. If, however, the system is a qualitative whole, then the system only exists if its parts or members co-produce it by their dynamic interaction from moment to moment. Natural scientists, for their part, envision systems as self-sustaining realities able to exercise agency vis-à-vis one another. Yet they consider the basic constituents of systems to be inanimate entities (atoms). I counter-argue that, if the constitutive parts of a system are mini-organisms, then the system is not, as commonly believed, a material thing but an ongoing processive reality in which past events influence present events and present events have an impact on future events. A systems-oriented world, in other words, is a mega-organism in a world populated by intermediate organisms, large or small, at all levels of existence and activity within nature. It is not a hierarchy of individual entities with relatively fixed relations to one another in virtue of universal laws and principles as in classical metaphysics. In chapter 3, therefore, I suggested a compromise position based on the notion of systems as qualitative wholes, collective realities that are different from simply the quantitative sum of their parts from moment to moment. What I plan to do next in chapter 4 is to ask why many contemporary natural scientists resist the notion of self-constituting subjects of experience (Whiteheadian “actual entities”) as a starting point for the scientific understanding of evolution as based on bottom-up causality. Clearly there is

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a bias on their part against classical metaphysics as an unneeded abstraction from the empirical details of their research. But, in thus ignoring the effects of formal as well as final causality in the scientific analysis of the data, they are inadvertently guilty of even more abstraction from the full details of what actually happened to produce evolutionary growth and development. I will be assisted here by the analysis of scientific methodology in the work of two philosophers of science, namely, Arran Gare in Australia and Robert Ulanowicz in the United States. Afterward, in chapter 5, I summarize the work of Granville Henry in his detailed review of the long and tangled history of reason and revelation (science and religion) in Western culture. For, I fully agree with Henry that religion and science are not at odds with one another; neither approach to reality makes full sense apart from what the other side takes for granted. Taken together, chapters 4 and 5, therefore, constitute part 2 of this book. That is, these two chapters set up the logical parameters for improved dialogue between natural scientists and philosopher or theologians to negotiate a common worldview. For, given the tendency to relativism in postmodern critique of “social location” in both the sciences and the humanities, the need for common ground in their preunderstanding of basic concepts and principles is quite urgent. Afterward, in part 3 of this book I will offer my systems-oriented approach to various key issues related to evolution and the God-world relationship. NOTES   1.  Alexander Bogdanov, Essays in Tektology: The General Science of Organization, trans. Georg Gorelik (Seaside, CA: Intersystems Publications, 1980).   2.  See George Gorelik, “Bogdanov’s Tektology: Its Basic Concepts and Relevance to Modern Generalizing Sciences,” Human Systems Management (1), no. 4 (1980): 327–37.   3.  Ludwig von Bertalanffy, General Systems Theory: Foundations, Development, Applications, rev. ed. (New York: George Braziller, 1968), vii.  4. Ibid., xxi.  5. Ibid., 121.  6. Ervin László, Introduction to Systems Philosophy: Toward a New Paradigm of Contemporary Thought (London: Gordon and Breach, 1972), 30.  7. Ibid.  8. Ervin László, The Systems View of the World: The Natural Philosophy of the New Development of the Sciences (New York: Braziller, 1972), 30–33.  9. Ervin László, The Connectivity Hypothesis: Foundations of an Integral Science of Quantum, Cosmos, Life, and Consciousness (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003), 103–104. 10.  Ibid., 104. 11.  Ibid., 104–105. 12.  Ervin László, Science and the Reenchantment of the Cosmos: The Rise of the Integral Vision of Reality (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2006), 25. 13.  Ervin László, Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Field of Everything, 2nd ed. (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2007), 68–69. 14.  Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics: Or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1948).



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15.  See here Bertalanffy, General Systems Theory, 150. 16. Hans Georg Moeller, Luhmann Explained: From Souls to Systems (Chicago: Open Court, 2006), 8. 17.  Ibid., 19. 18.  Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems, trans. John Bednarz Jr., with Dirk Baecker (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 13. 19.  Ibid., 20–23. 20.  Ibid., 93. 21.  See, e.g., David Sloan Wilson, Darwin’s Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, and the Nature of Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003). Wilson proposes that human society is an open-ended unifying system or mega-organism. Likewise, see Reiner Wiehl, Subjectivitȁt und System (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000). Wiehl proposes that subjectivity is at work in objective rational systems as well as in ordinary human experience. 22. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 51. 23.  Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics, trans. Simon Carnell and Erica Segree (Random House, UK, 2014), 29–31. See also Whitehead’s discussion of the materialistic assumptions of early modern natural science in chapter 2. 24.  See Jesper Hoffmeyer, Biosemiotics: An Examination into the Signs of Life and the Life of Signs, trans. Jesper Hoffmeyer and Donald Favareau, ed. Donald Favareau (Scranton, PA: Scranton University Press, 2008), 3–5, 31–37, 196–97. 25. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 31. 26.  Ibid., 35, 61. 27.  Ibid., 90–91. 28. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 149. 29. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 35. 30.  Ibid., 250–51. 31.  Ibid., 35. 32.  Ibid., 21. 33.  Ibid., 61. 34.  Cf., however, Bertalanffy, General Systems Theory, 152–53: “At present we know no physical law which would prescribe that, in a ‘soup’ of organic compounds, open-ended systems, self-maintaining in a state of highest improbability, are formed. And even if such systems are accepted as being ‘given,’ there is no law in physics stating that their evolution, on the whole, would proceed in the direction of increasing organization.” 35.  Stuart Kauffman, At Home in the Universe: The Search for Laws of Self-Organization and Complexity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 3–30. See, however, Bertalanffy. General Systems Theory, 152–53. 36.  Stuart Kauffman, Reinventing the Sacred: A New View of Science, Reason and Religion (New York: Basic Books, 2008). 37.  Ibid., 281–88. 38.  Stuart A. Kauffman, A World Beyond Physics: The Emergence and Evolution of Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019), x. 39. Ibid. 40.  Ibid., 9. 41. Kauffman, A World Beyond Physics, 14. 42.  Ibid., 51. 43.  Terrence W. Deacon, Incomplete Nature; How Mind Emerged from Matter (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), 175. 44.  Ibid., 192. 45.  Ibid., 191. 46.  Ibid., 337. 47.  Ibid., 237. 48.  Cf., chapter 2; see also Whitehead, Process and Reality, 90–91. 49. Deacon, Incomplete Nature, 289. See also Philip Clayton, Mind and Emergence: From Quantum to Consciousness (Oxford University Press, 2004), 46–47.

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50. Deacon, Incomplete Nature, 289. See also Joseph Bracken, “Is Terrence Deacon’s Metaphysics of Incompleteness Still Incomplete?” American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 38 (May–September 2017), 138–51, esp. 144–51. 51.  See, n. 24. 52. Evelyn Fox Keller, The Century of the Gene (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), 66–72, 133–48. 53.  See, e.g., Celia Deane-Drummond, The Wisdom of the Liminal: Evolution and Other Animals in Human Becoming (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2014), 219–22. 54.  Simon Conway Morris, The Runes of Evolution: How the Universe Became Self-Aware (West Conshohocken, PA: Templeton Foundation Press, 2015), 3–8, 297–300. 55.  See on this point Deacon, Incomplete Nature, 183–85; Joseph A. Bracken, “Feeling Our Way Forward,” Theology and Science 8, no. 3 (August, 2010), 319–31. 56.  John Gribbin, Deep Simplicity: Bringing Order to Chaos and Simplicity (New York: Random House, 2005), 88–100. 57.  Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 67. 58.  Ibid., 87–88. 59.  Alvin Plantinga, God, Freedom and Evil (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1977). See also Harold S. Kushner, When Bad Things Happen to Good People (New York: Anchor Books/Random House, 2004). Kushner argues that God does not prevent natural evil but advises human beings on how to deal with it effectively rather than to be overwhelmed by it. 60. Aquinas, Summa theologiae, I, Q. 22, art., 3, ad 2–3. 61.  See Whitehead, Process and Reality, 177–78. 62.  Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge (New York: Doubleday, 1966), 52.

Part II

FAILURE TO DEAL WITH MAJOR ISSUES OF THE COMMON GOOD

Chapter Four

Critical Evaluation of Modern Scientific Method

ARRAN GARE Arran Gare has written an ambitious book titled The Philosophical Foundations of Ecological Civilization. Therein he claims that the metaphysical presuppositions of contemporary natural science are not adequate to diagnose and provide a suitable remedy for current environmental issues arising out of misuse of nature’s ever-shrinking resources: “To create a viable future, it will be necessary to open the way for questioning and replacing the prevailing reductionist form of naturalism, along with the scientism engendered by and supporting it; and, correspondingly, for questioning and replacing the debased notions of life and humanity promoted by orthodox biologists, economists and psychologists.”1 Instead Gare proposes a new worldview grounded in a largely overlooked tradition of philosophy, namely, speculative naturalism initially set forth by the German idealists, above all, Friedrich Schelling. “This is a tradition that could be characterized as effecting a third Copernican Revolution. It is a post-Kantian tradition, accepting Kant’s second Copernican Revolution that had focused on human consciousness and agency, but then naturalizing [Kantian] Idealism to conceive nature in such a way that living beings, subjects and humanity, with all their cognitive and creative powers, can be seen as evolving within, as parts and participating in a creative nature.”2 Nature, in other words, preceded the existence of human beings but has found in human consciousness the highest manifestation of its creative power. Thus the world of nature, properly understood, provides the infrastructure for the life of the spirit. Spirit in turn provides the superstructure or ultimate meaning and value for the workings of the cosmic process and the development of new technologies to serve the common good. 59

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Thus speculative naturalism is totally opposed to scientism, the misuse of legitimate scientific methodology to control the forces of nature for the sake of relatively short-term goals and values that in the end largely serve the interests of the rich and powerful rather than the needs of ordinary people. An ecological civilization must be oriented instead to the common good of all humanity and the continued well-being of the cosmic process insofar as it applies to life on this earth. In early chapters of his book, Gare explores how a dialectical understanding of the relation between matter and spirit was initially worked out by Schelling and Hegel and then transmitted in different ways to later nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophical schools of thought (e.g., Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels and their followers; existential phenomenologists like Jean Paul Sartre; structuralists like Claude Lévi-Strauss, Louis Althusser and Michel Foucault; finally, genetic structuralists like Jean Piaget and Pierre Bourdieu).3 Piaget and Bourdieu, for example, converted the relatively static approach to physical reality in structuralism as set forth by Lévi-Strauss and others into the more process-oriented theory of genetic structuralism with its focus on ever-changing cognitive structures and corresponding fields of social relations within which individual humans compete with one another for “capital,” ways of dealing with and exercising power over others.4 Alasdair McIntyre and Paul Ricoeur in turn introduced still another factor, namely, narratology or historical development, into the theory of genetic structuralism.5 In the second half of his book, however, Gare sets forth his version of the ontological naturalism originally set forth by Schelling and its application to an ecological worldview. Two key resources for him are the cosmologies of C. S. Peirce and Alfred North Whitehead. “Peirce showed that induction and deduction do not exhaust reasoning; reasoning in all domains of inquiry requires also abduction (or hypothesis formation), which is really speculation.”6 That is, a hypothesis can never be definitively proven. It is provisionally accepted only it meets the standards for verifiability set by a community of scholars. Whitehead agrees with this understanding of human cognition: “[R]ationality in its most basic form is neither deduction nor induction, but the search for principles or schemes of ideas.”7 Accordingly, “all claims to understanding, including metaphysical claims, are fallible and therefore provisional.”8 Other philosophers of science (e.g., Gaston Bachelard, Michael Polanyi, Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, and Paul Feyerabend) likewise questioned the possibility of a single uniform methodology for natural science and instead proposed a more historically conditioned approach to the scientific understanding of physical reality. Still, other philosophers of science seem to have followed Schelling’s original insight that reality is hierarchically ordered and that lower-order and higher-order levels within the cosmic process have a profound influence on one another, each offering boundary



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limits or constraints on the existence and activity of the other. As Stanley Salthe points out, “emergence, in both evolution and development, is associated with interpolation between processes of smaller and larger scales and faster and slower rate processes, modifying both the longer and shorter scale processes.”9 Thus final causality becomes operative in nature once again through various forms of formal causality (i.e., boundary limits or internal constraints). In the concluding pages of chapter 4, Gare notes the difference between speculative naturalism and speculative materialism. Robert Rosen developed mathematical models based on the experience of life in its fullness rather than simply on abstract quantitative analysis.10 The thought of Alain Badiou, on the contrary, was a form of speculative materialism because he focused on contingent relations between individual entities and/or events for themselves rather than as parts or members of a higher-order totality or comprehensive scheme.11 In chapter 5 Gare calls for radical enlightenment in the search for truth and justice as opposed to the quest for power and control. “Overcoming the enslavement of countries, communities, economic organizations and individuals to the managers of transnational corporations and their political allies, surmounting managerialism and the imposition of the laws of the market on humanity and the reduction of workers to trained gorillas, requires not a command economy with central planning, as orthodox Marxists are still prone to believe, but the revival of democratic politics and self-management and the values and virtues required for these”12 The individualistic controloriented approach to human life originally promoted by John Hobbes but then carried forward by John Locke, Adam Smith, Jeremy Bentham, and Herbert Spenser must be countered by an ethical and political philosophy that subordinates markets to democratic institutions within communities and thereby allow the members of the communities first to define what they mean by the common good and then to pursue it vigorously.13 The goal of speculative philosophy, then, “is to take into account the whole range of human experience—scientific, social, ethical, aesthetic and religious, and to develop a coherent conception of reality that does justice to all of these.”14 It is, accordingly, the exact opposite of scientism, the confinement of what is good and of value in human life to purely quantitative measurement and immediate empirical verification. Not just efficient causality, therefore, but also final causality, striving for future goals and values, should be at work in the mode of operation of both individual entities and the systems to which they belong.15 In the final chapter of his book, Gare applies the ideal of radical enlightenment to the notion of ecological civilization. “Making science consistent with the reality of humans and their potential for understanding, responsibility and creativity not only is an advance of science; it is a transformation of culture and therefore a development of the humanities. . . . [I]t is also a

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transformation of nature, altering how we act and live within society and nature and what and how we produce.”16 But, to make this happen, “the ultimate existents of the universe would have to be seen as creative processes or durational self-constraining patterns of activity, and configurations of such processes at multiple scales in dynamic interaction, rather than [as] objects or things, which are taken to have only a derivative status.”17 Here Gare is claiming that processes with persistent patterns produce things, not vice versa. He further notes that the breakdown of healthy systems can have many causes, but a breakdown in communication or coordination between the parts or members of a given system with subsequent loss to its overall pattern of existence and activity (e.g., the rapid growth of cancer cells within the body) is clearly one of the key causes of ill health.18 To guard against this happening in the case of humanly contrived systems, one must take seriously what Gare calls the politics and the ethics of ecopoiesis (“homemaking”). The task of the politics of ecopoiesis is to use the concepts of ecological theory to rethink the political philosophy of Aristotle, Hegel, and the liberal tradition of the Enlightenment to set up “a multi-leveled federalism of human communities of communities from the local to the global level, acknowledging broad regions, nations, provinces and localities, where human communities are understood as participating in the complex of biotic communities of communities ranging up to the global ecosystem, or Gaia.”19 Gare offers multiple options to fulfill that goal including “public ownership of financial institutions, natural resources and natural monopolies along with schools, universities and prisons.”20 He also recommends “progressive taxation” and increased inheritance taxes to maintain more egalitarian societies, finance public institutions, and provide incomes for those engaged in tasks and projects serving the common good.21 Likewise, the public relations arms of private corporations should be held more accountable for honesty in what they offer to the public, and workers in an industry should be empowered to participate along with stockholders in determining the long-term goals and values of the corporation in which they are employed. For many people, these action-oriented proposals may seem to promote a form of state socialism rather than genuine democracy. But Gare is serious about the reformation of worldwide economic and political structures and so risks setting forth initiatives that will be often misunderstood and actively resisted in some quarters. Gare goes on to define the task of the ethics of ecopoiesis. First, he quotes the noted environmentalist, Aldo Leopold: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”22 But he further notes with C. S. Pierce that the real question is not what is right, but “what am I prepared deliberately to accept as the statement of what I want to do, what am I to aim at, what am I after?”23 Ethics must lead to action or it is abstract speculation and nothing



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more. Human beings have the power to improve the environment as well as to degrade it. Likewise, Gare refers to the English philosopher Alasdair McIntyre who critiqued early modern ethical theory grounded in Thomas Hobbes’s pessimistic approach to life in society and recommended instead a theory of virtue ethics based on the philosophy of Aristotle.24 Gare, however, concludes that McIntyre’s philosophical anthropology is still too individualistic insofar as it fails to take into account many other conditioning factors: for example, the corporate responsibility of human beings not only to protect but to enhance the physical environment in which they live; likewise, the complex character of life in contemporary society where the same individuals find themselves in several societies (political, economic, or professional) simultaneously.25 Gare points to the importance of the right model of reality for those engaged in establishing an ecological way of life. Choice of a suitable model, however, cannot be the task simply of the natural sciences, nor of the mathematically based social sciences. For, these disciplines tend to study the actions of human beings to manage and control them. The humanities, on the contrary, focus on the actions of individuals and communities in the search for personal liberty and democratic forms of government.26 For, unlike other sentient animal species, human beings possess heightened reflexivity, the ability to anticipate the distant future and to choose which possibilities to realize. Likewise, they can organize their individual and group activities in terms of shared experiences (personal stories and community history).27 Market-oriented economies governed by mathematical models and meansend thinking, on the contrary, tend to de-personalize human relations and inhibit individual creativity.28 Hence, concludes Gare, “markets should be reduced to instruments for decentralizing decision-making, while basing returns to factors of production on principles of justice, rather than as they presently are—instruments of domination disguised as market imperatives.”29 Gare concludes: “A demystified technology will have as its goal augmenting the conditions . . . for the flourishing of life, taking into account that as active agents formed by culture and utilizing manufactured instruments, people are autonomous participants within ecosystems. Their primary concern as agents ‘managing’ these ecosystems must always be maintain or augment the health of these ecosystems, including themselves as participants within these, rather than to maximize yield.”30 In summing up the results of his book, then, Gare recommends a dialogic grand narrative that allows for “the diverse voices of participants, situated in diverse and complexly related communities, organizations and economic, social and cultural fields with diverse histories, to question and participate in revising, reformulating and developing the narratives they are living out, from the local to the global level, preserving the autonomy of their communities,

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institutions and fields as the condition for such participation.”31 Undergirding such a comprehensive narrative would be a philosophical cosmology based on speculative naturalism—that is, Schelling’s vision of the ontological priority of nature that finds its highest and most creative manifestation or instantiation in the existence and activity of human beings. It is a speculative rather than reductionistic form of nature, focused on the workings of spirit in matter rather than the reduction of spirit to matter. At the same time, it is not a “free-floating body of thought but developed in the contexts of practices in which people are making a living, defending their liberty, striving to govern themselves, engaged in inquiry and transforming their cultures” as members of local participatory communities.32 Thus understood, Gare’s “dialogic grand narrative” not only undergirds an ecological ethic but also contributes mightily to overcoming the widespread feelings of helplessness and alienation in contemporary society. As I noted earlier, the two tasks are closely interrelated. ROBERT ULANOWICZ Robert Ulanowicz, emeritus professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, has written a book on ecology as the preferred “window” for understanding the workings of physical reality. As Stuart Kauffman comments in his foreword to A Third Window: Natural Life beyond Newton and Darwin, Ulanowicz “seeks to go beyond both reductionism, the first window on the world, captured in the Newtonian worldview with its time-reversible laws, and Darwin, who brought history deeply into the second window on the world, with a third window based on process ecology.”33 Ulanowicz defines the term process as follows: “A process is the interaction of random events upon a configuration of constraints that results in a non-random but indeterminate outcome.”34 Thus defined, a process is totally foreign to the Newtonian worldview which presupposed a closed or fully determinate universe in which effects follow from causes unilaterally, wholes can be reduced to the sum of their parts, and the laws of nature are unchanging and thus unaffected by historical change.35 Ulanowicz’s understanding of the evolutionary process also differs from Darwin’s understanding of the origin of species through natural selection. That is, while Darwin conceded that evolution is a historical reality and to that extent somewhat contingent in its outcome, he still conceived natural selection as akin to a purely mechanical process in which entities with a determinate mode of operation either adapt or fail to adapt to their external environment.36 He thereby failed to take into account that the members of the various species are organisms that are capable of internal change and development through interaction with their environment. Ulanowicz himself, however, may have



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erred in claiming that a process is a succession of random events. It is rather a succession of contingent events—that is, events with some measure of predictability, given the “constraints” imposed upon their self-constitution by their place in a historical succession of events. Ulanowicz could have profited here from reflection on Whitehead’s premise that actual entities as momentary self-constituting subjects of experience are heavily influenced in their self-constitution both by their historical predecessors and by their potential successors within the society to which they belong.37 Either way, of course, evolution is indeterminate or open-ended. Its outcome from moment to moment can never be precisely predicted, given all the contingencies at work in the process as a whole.38 At the same time, the result at any given moment is not totally unpredictable, pure chaos. Ulanowicz follows Karl Popper in referring to propensities rather than laws to guarantee order and regularity within the evolutionary process.39 Even more important for maintaining continuity, however, is the tendency of individual processes to become engaged with other kindred processes to affect themselves as a result. This is what is commonly known as “feedback.” Ulanowicz quotes Gregory Bateson here: “In principle, then, a causal circuit will generate a non-random response to a random event.”40 What would have been indeterminate is made determinate by its presence in a causal chain. Ulanowicz, however, further claims that some measure of final causality is also at work here as well as the normal efficient causality of a causal chain. That is, the causal has an inbuilt “propensity” to produce one particular kind of outcome. Furthermore, if only efficient causality is involved, the feedback mechanism will be negative in its results. For then there are no constraints on the continued reproduction of the causal chain (like a cancer at work in an otherwise healthy organism). But, if final causality is also involved in the feedback mechanism, then the results are positive. What results is “autocatalysis,” namely, the propensity for each new member of the chain to “facilitate” the occurrence of the next member of the chain in the same direction as its predecessors.41 Hence, the feedback mechanism does not run amok but results in a fixed pattern or configuration in its mode of operation. In this way, a system can endure over time and be successfully reestablished if ever disturbed by external forces. But its mode of operation is not thereby purely mechanical; a certain amount of contingency is still present to keep the system open-ended rather than closed.42 Another positive feature of an autocatalytic system is its “centripetality” in interaction with the environment. That is, it engages in a resource exchange with the environment so that it both draws from and contributes to the overall well-being of the system at the same time.43 In this way, the internal process of autocatalysis replaces the extrinsic cause-effect relations of Darwinian natural selection as the more natural way to determine which components of a system survive and prosper and which components do not.44

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Competition between components of an autocatalytic system for use of available resources will therefore inevitably be present but such competition in the end should further the well-being and further development of the system as a whole. Competition, in other words, yields to mutuality and increased well-being for all the surviving components of the system.45 In this way, an autocatalytic system can in this way “heal itself” and survive minor disturbances coming from the environment. In addition, an autocatalytic system of sufficient size and complexity will begin to exhibit some degree of autonomy from its components. That is, while in the early stages of an autocatalytic system, its components exhibit little or no spontaneity in their interaction with one another and the mode of operation of the system remains constant and unvarying, in later stages such spontaneity among the components results in a new life form with a mode of operation different from that of its components. Growth in size and complexity has taken place.46 But problems arise if a balance is not struck between growth in size and complexity: “a well-organized system has an advantage over one that is less structured but it might still be overwhelmed by another system that is less organized but bigger or more active. Conversely, a vigorous system could be displaced by one that is smaller or less active but better organized.”47 Accordingly, there are two rival tendencies at work in an autocatalytic system. The first is its tendency to evolve further or its “ascendancy.” The second is its tendency to “overhead”—maintaining the status quo as a safeguard against potential disturbances coming from outside the system. Systems that strive to maintain the status quo, however, experience little growth in complexity, while systems with a high degree of complexity remain much more vulnerable in emergencies.48 Ulanowicz deals with this tension between ascendency and overhead by distinguishing two different kinds of agency that can be at work in autocatalytic systems: top-down influence and top-down causality. Top-down influence is a defining characteristic of higher-level systems, and top-down causality is normally at work in lower-level systems.49 Higher-level systems are more “democratic” in their mode of operation and thus have more flexibility in dealing with contingencies. Lower-level systems, on the contrary, are more “monarchical” in their mode of operation and thus less equipped to deal with unexpected emergencies. As a result, their lifespan is usually shorter than that of higher-order systems with their greater ability to improvise and plan for the future. Along the same lines, Ulanowicz proposes a distinction between individual organisms with irreplaceable parts or members and organic systems with replaceable parts or members and thus more freedom to adapt to new circumstances.50 For example, the discovery of the DNA molecule displaced all previous methods of information storage within cells and higher-order organisms.51



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Yet Ulanowicz also reminds the reader about the indispensable role of overhead in the evolutionary process: So, ascendency tells one how well the system is [a] processing medium, i.e., how well it is performing or how well organized is the power flowing within the network. Overhead, on the other hand, encompasses all the disorganized elements and behaviors that remain. It should be immediately be noted, however, that such incoherent behaviors also represent degrees of freedom and flexibility that could be used by the system in the event of novel disturbance to replace functions in the previously unperturbed configuration. Thus, although overhead represents inefficiency and incoherency under normal operation, it also serves as strength-in-reserve to ensure system reliability.52

In brief, then, an autocatalytic system is not machine-like but rather life-like or organismic in its mode of operation. It has unexpected resources to deal with contingencies that no machine can be predesigned to handle with any kind of efficiency. From a metaphysical as opposed to an empirically based perspective, Ulanowicz is arguing for a shift in focus from material entities and the inanimate forces at work between them to a new focus on patterns resulting from the interaction of initially agonistic propensities that mutually constrain one another in the production of a new higher-order system. In the next chapter Ulanowicz offers a sketch of a process ecology, starting with three postulates or presuppositions: first, that the operation of any system is vulnerable to disruption by chance events; second, that a process can influence its own mode of operation if it is involved in a causal chain with other processes; and third, systems differ from one another by their individual histories as reflected in their governing structures or material configurations.53 Ulanowicz points out how these three presuppositions contradict the axioms of classical Newtonian physics. That is, systems are open-ended or indeterminate; Newtonian physics is closed or determinate. Systems are totalities greater than the sum of their parts; Newtonian physics is atomistic (the whole is nothing more than the sum of its parts). The laws of Newtonian physics are reversible; the propensities of systems are nonreversible or historical.54 Laws are based on generalities; the propensities of systems are grounded in historical events. Laws deal with physical forces and material objects; propensities condition but do not predetermine subsequent events. Accordingly, while laws are based on unilateral cause-effect relations; propensities are agonistic. They conflict with one another and yet complement one another in producing a joint effect.55 Thus the classical relationship between chance and law must be revised in a systems-ordered world. It is not enough to appeal to statistical mechanics to recover a sense of lawfulness in the workings of physical reality. For “configurations of processes are not wholly the consequences of their primitive

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constituents because upper-level configurations can exert superfacience [topdown influence] upon their lower-level components.”56 Furthermore, in line with the precepts of chaos theory, classical laws likewise cannot explain how a minor event at an early stage of a process can have a major impact on events at a later stage of the process.57 Yet the existence of chance in the workings of nature does not produce a chaotic state of affairs: “feedback controls exist at all levels and work to ameliorate most random events, thereby circumscribing the extent of their effects.”58 Furthermore, systems are immune to most perturbations and can safely ignore them (just as the human body is immune to many pathogens). Concerning the workings of causality in autocatalytic systems, Ulanowicz argues that feedback mechanisms within such systems work to make their constituents “co-dependent” on one another. As a result, they lose their independence as causal agents in their own right so that their effect on one another is bilateral or reciprocal rather than unilateral. They function, in other words, more like organisms than like machines. If one part deteriorates, all parts are negatively affected. Again, like organisms systems possess an implicit directionality that is set by the ongoing interaction of the constituents with one another. If chance events coincidentally enhance that directionality, their impact on the system will be that much greater.59 History or nonreversibility is also characteristic of systems but with the qualification that the system must be sufficiently complex (e.g., an autocatalytic system) to have an internal principle of self-organization and thus to have enough of an identity to have a history. To have an internal principle of organization, however, runs counter to Darwin’s understanding of natural selection through external factors (e.g., an ever-changing environment).60 Likewise, as noted above, whereas Darwin stresses competition among organisms for survival, the systems-oriented approach claims that mutuality or cooperation between systems with rival propensities is still the best guarantee for the survival and well-being of all of them. Ulanowicz then deals with objections to his process-oriented ecology. First, the feedback mechanism likewise works in the case of systems with little or no internal organization (e.g., whirlwinds, thunderstorms, hurricanes). Ulanowicz responds that centripetality could also be at work in these weather phenomena as proto-ecosystems.61 Likewise, others object that what appears to be a chance event is actually due to ignorance of all the laws at work in the situation, to which Ulanowicz responds that this is a matter of belief, not of rational argument based on empirical data. If something genuinely new happens, then it cannot be caused by antecedent events.62 Still others object that Darwin’s explanation of natural selection through external factors is much simpler than explanation through a combination of factors internal to the system. Ulanowicz’s response is that Darwin’s explanation is too simple, too easily applicable to a wide variety of phenomena that bear only a slight



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resemblance to the workings of a molecule or cell (e.g., the notion of memes as the counterpart to genes in the evolution of culture).63 Ulanowicz also notes the strengths of his process-oriented ecology. For example, while conventional natural science attributes agency to material objects, his process-oriented ecology more properly attributes agency to underlying processes within the material object. For example, genes as inert material objects do not direct the development of traits in human beings; rather, an underlying network of protein and enzymatic processes reads, selects, and edits the genome and then implements the subsequent development activity.64 Again, while a process-oriented ecology is not dependent on divine intervention in the workings of the evolutionary process, it does not deny that possibility. It distinguishes, in other words, between methodological and ontological materialism and thus is open in principle to insights about the nature of reality from divine revelation as found in the sacred texts of the world’s religions.65 Perhaps what is needed in the scientific investigation of physical reality is a new calculus, a “calculus of conditional probabilities” to deal with networks to which not all members of the network make an equal contribution.66 Finally, a process-oriented ecology throws new light on the problem of the emergence of life from nonliving components. Perhaps protoecological systems preceded the existence of proto-organisms. That is, a proto-system or circular configuration of processes could provide “the initial animation notably lacking in earlier scenarios.”67 Winnowing out unneeded components in the network could lead to smaller but more complex configurations, namely, proto-organisms. Matter itself may have originated from a mix of circular vortices that were constantly being created and destroyed by interaction with photons right after the Big Bang but achieved equilibrium with subsequent expansion of the spatial parameters of the nascent universe. Thus a mix of processes first created matter and then created life in much the same way.68 In the final chapter, Ulanowicz summarizes the argument of the book. First, the indeterminacy native to a process- or systems-oriented universe releases the creativity or spontaneity of the evolutionary process from the constraints of universal laws and principles. This is most evident at the level of human thought.69 Second, a system must retain a modicum of both efficiency and reliability, in other words, the tendency to become more tightly organized (ascendency) versus the need for alternative modes of operation in an emergency (overhead).70 Third, as noted previously, organisms do not function like machines. Their body parts are the result, not the cause, of an antecedent network of dynamically interrelated processes.71 Fourthly, a full understanding of physical reality, above all, human reality, must acknowledge the reciprocal relation between matter and spirit, the ongoing interplay of the immanent and the transcendent. Methodological naturalism is not the same as ontological naturalism—that is, the conscious exclusion of the

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realm of the spirit in scientific research; “striving, volition and emotion” are legitimate subjects of scientific research.72 At the same time, the theory of intelligent design set forth by William Demski, Michael Behe that endorses a pseudoscientific understanding of the relationship between God and creation should be rejected as not really helpful to the relations between natural scientists and Christian theologians.73 For much the same reason, theologians should acknowledge that suffering and natural evil are inevitably part of an evolutionary process based on trial and error. Likewise, intentional evil on the part of human beings has to be allowed for the sake of a higher good, namely, the integrity of human free will.74 Does God play a role in everything that happens, even what is evil and involves suffering? Perhaps but there is no scientific way to resolve that question.75 Ulanowicz sums up the shifts in perspective that result from wholeheartedly adopting a systems-oriented approach to reality. First, pay less attention to deterministic laws and more attention to underlying processes. Processes (photons) “gave rise to the first objects (paired matter and anti-matter), and the ontological priority of process over object continues into our present world.”76 Causal agency is reversed at opposite ends of the hierarchy of systems. Causal agency is primarily bottom-up at the lower levels of organization but top-down at the higher levels. That is, there is a dividing-line or “causal fold” between living and inanimate systems. Inanimate systems are constituted by “objects moving at the behest of simple forces.” Living systems are constituted by processes that represent a balance between feedback and chance, ascendency and overhead.77 At the same time, living systems are productive of material things as well as other life systems. Is there a logical inconsistency here? That logical inconsistency can be resolved, however, if one agrees with Whitehead that, while the ultimate units of physical reality are indeed alive, mini-organisms, their agency vis-à-vis one another at the lower levels of organization is lacking in spontaneity and thus appears to be mechanical. At the upper levels of organization, the components of the systems are much more dynamic and spontaneous in their interaction with one another. Only at this higher-order level of existence and activity within nature does a combination of feedback and chance play a decisive role. Likewise, only at this level does divine agency possibly play a role in the directionality of the evolutionary process.78 Arran Gare and Robert Ulanowicz both critiqued the reductionistic and at least implicitly materialistic approach to physical reality of early modern natural science that has indeed heavily influenced the rapid growth of technology and a worldwide market-oriented economy. But this advance in the conditions of human life has unfortunately worked mainly for the increased well-being of the privileged few at the expense of the underprivileged and the poor. As a result, a widespread feeling of isolation and alienation among ordinary people has developed that does not bode well for efforts to deal



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with problematic issues in contemporary society, notably a looming ecological crisis that can only be dealt with successfully in communal fashion with everyone taking responsibility for “saving the environment.” Both Gare and Ulanowicz have recommended a more open-ended or systems-oriented approach to life with its focus on cooperation to achieve a common good as a counterbalance to the single-minded pursuit of short-centered goals and values so much in evidence in economic and political life at present. NOTES   1.  Arran Gare, The Philosophical Foundations of Ecological Civilization: A Manifesto for the Future (New York: Routledge, 2017), 6.  2. Ibid., 51–52.  3. Ibid., 53–104.  4. Ibid., 81–92.  5. Ibid., 95–99.  6. Ibid., 111.  7. Ibid., 114.  8. Ibid., 115.  9. Ibid., 131. 10.  Ibid., 138–39. 11.  Ibid., 134–35. 12.  Ibid., 153. 13.  Ibid., 154–55. 14.  Ibid., 161. 15.  Ibid., 164–65. 16.  Ibid., 177. 17.  Ibid., 178. 18.  Ibid., 180–81. 19.  Ibid., 184. 20.  Ibid., 186. 21. Ibid. 22.  Ibid., 193. 23. Ibid. 24.  Ibid., 195–96. 25.  Ibid., 197–99. 26.  Ibid., 200. 27.  Ibid., 201, 204. Cf. also Josiah Royce, The Problem of Christianity, John Smith, ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968), 251–71. 28. Gare, Philosophical Foundations, 202. 29.  Ibid., 204. 30.  Ibid., 207. 31.  Ibid., 209. 32.  Ibid., 210. 33.  Robert E. Ulanowicz, A Third Window: Natural Law beyond Newton and Darwin (West Conshohocken, 2017), xi (Foreword by Stuart Kauffman). 34.  Ibid., 29. 35.  Ibid., 20–24. 36.  Ibid., 37. 37. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 18. 38. Ulanowicz, A Third Window, 47–48. 39.  Ibid., 55.

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40. Ibid., 61. Cf. Gregory Bateson, Steps to an Ecology of Mind (New York: Ballentine Books, 1972), 404. 41.  Ibid., 64–69. 42.  Ibid., 68–69, 77. 43.  Ibid., 69. 44.  Ibid., 73–75. 45.  Ibid., 76. 46.  Ibid., 78–80. 47.  Ibid., 85. 48.  Ibid., 95. 49.  Ibid., 97. 50.  Ibid., 96–97. 51.  Ibid., 102–3. 52.  Ibid., 111–12. 53.  Ibid., 115. 54.  Ibid., 115–16. 55.  Ibid., 117–18. 56.  Ibid., 120, 102. 57.  Ibid., 121. 58.  Ibid., 122. 59.  Ibid., 126. 60.  Ibid., 128–29. 61.  Ibid., 130. 62.  Ibid., 131–32. 63.  Ibid., 133. 64.  Ibid., 136. 65.  Ibid., 137–38, 144–45. 66.  Ibid., 139–43. 67.  Ibid., 146. 68.  Ibid., 149. 69.  Ibid., 151. 70.  Ibid., 153. 71.  Ibid., 153–54. 72.  Ibid., 157. 73.  Ibid., 159–60. 74.  Ibid., 161. 75.  Ibid., 163. 76.  Ibid., 164. 77.  Ibid., 165–66. 78.  Ibid., 167–68.

Chapter Five

Reconciling the Truth-Claims of Science and Religion

In this fifth chapter, I review Granville Henry’s critical appraisal of the historical relations within Western civilization between religion and science, in particular the truth-claims proper to each and how they can be reconciled with one another to the advantage of both belief systems and the common good. He titles the book Christianity and the Images of Science. Thereby he limits the scope of his analysis to Christianity (Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, and Eastern Orthodoxy). With images of science, he means insights, intuitions, and models used by scientists to illuminate the meaning and value of their empirical research and later incorporated by philosophers into their philosophy of science.1 He adds: “I intend to show that images and philosophical perspectives derivative from science have conditioned most Christians’ understanding about God, religious history, the divinity of Christ, miracles, the nature of the future, and our souls, as well as other theological topics.”2 In the first chapter, accordingly, he sets forth and then illustrates the first of three theses on the relation between religion and science: “Christians normally accept good science. They may then see science as part of theology and contained in the Bible.”3 To illustrate that point, he reviews the conflicting opinions among early Greek astronomers about the earth and its relation to the sun. Anaximander (c. 610–c. 546 BCE), for example, using geometrical imagery proclaimed that the earth was flat; if one sailed to the edge, one would fall off.4 A later Greek astronomer Eratosthenes (276–194 BCE), on the contrary, used empirical observations regarding the shadow of the sun at different times and places to claim that the earth is not flat but curved, a sphere. The Biblical texts are inconclusive about the shape of the earth. Isaiah claimed that the earth is circular; Ezekiel and Revelation assert that the earth is flat.5 Eventually, Biblical 73

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scholars agreed that the passages in Ezekiel and Revelation were figurative, not literal. But they only did so because the voyages of discovery undertaken by Christopher Columbus and others in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries empirically established that Eratosthenes was right. Hence, Henry’s first thesis is vindicated. The church accepts good science and incorporates it into the interpretation of Biblical revelation. In the following chapter, however, where he analyzes rival scientific theories about an earth-centered or sun-centered universe, the relation between science and religion becomes more complicated. The Greek astronomer Aristarchus (c. 310–c. 230 BCE) believed that the earth revolved around the sun. Another Greek astronomer Archimedes (c. 287–c. 212 BCE), however, claimed that the earth was the center of the universe. Since the mathematics of Archimedes was judged to be superior to the mathematics of Aristarchus, astronomers up through the Middle Ages believed that Archimedes was right; the earth is the center of the universe. Christian theologians followed suit and adjusted the Christian worldview accordingly. They located heaven beyond the sphere of the stars and declared hell to be below the surface of the earth at its center.6 This geocentric approach to the universe was, of course, challenged first by Copernicus and then by Galileo. Their mathematical calculation of the ever-changing movement of the stars, however, was just as inconsistent with empirical observation of the movement of the stars as was that of Ptolemy (c. 100 CE–c. 170 CE). The correct laws of planetary motion were eventually formulated by Johannes Kepler who postulated that the movement of the stars around the sun was elliptical, not circular as presupposed by Ptolemy and later by Copernicus and Galileo. But the philosophical-theological overtones of the theories of Copernicus and Galileo were felt immediately since it called into question the traditional Christian worldview as grounded in various texts of Sacred Scripture. Furthermore, the belief that the earth was the center of the universe was confirmed by common-sense experience. Accordingly, when the Aristarchian theory proclaiming a suncentered universe was reintroduced by Copernicus, it appeared to be both bad science and bad theology. It was also thought to conflict with the Bible even though the Bible really proclaims an earth-centered universe.7 Henry thus concludes that his second thesis about the proper relation between religion and science is true. The conflict between science and religion only occurs when religion, after accepting one scientific worldview into its theology, finds itself engaged with a new and different worldview.8 Philosophers and theologians feel obliged to defend the older science if only because it seems to be more consistent with the traditional understanding of scripture and church tradition. Eventually, if the new scientific theory proves to be correct, philosophers and theologians will invariably find ways to incorporate the new science into their religious worldview. But in the meantime, the tension between the truth-claims of science and the truth-claims of religion will run



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high, and the sense of an inevitable conflict between religion and science will once again be rampant. At the beginning of the next chapter, accordingly, Henry sets forth his third thesis for the proper relation between science and religion: “Any new science is necessarily cloaked in philosophical concepts that can influence religion.”9 That influence can be either positive or negative. For example, early Christian philosophers and theologians adopted as their mode of operation the a priori approach to the reality of the early Greek mathematicians, namely, what is rational must be true.10 Thus God was viewed as a totally transcendent reality removed from the messy world of ordinary human experience. But a literal reading of key Biblical texts would suggest the opposite; God is actively engaged in human history. This tension between reason and revelation within the Christian understanding of the God-world relationship still endures. But, as Henry sees it, even that tension can be resolved if Christian philosophers and theologians recognize that contemporary science has changed and adopted new philosophical presuppositions about the nature of reality. Scientific analysis is no longer directed exclusively at what is fixed and unchanging but also at what is contingent and ever-changing or evolving. Accordingly, Christian philosophers and theologians should take advantage of concepts and principles coming from contemporary natural science to rethink the Christian worldview in evolutionary terms. The evidence for this shift in theological reflection is already available in those texts of the Hebrew Bible that indicate God’s pleasure or displeasure (wrath) in dealing with the Chosen People whom God again and again rescued from their own in dealing with the great powers of the ancient world. It is even more evident in the focus of the Christian Bible on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus as the Messiah or Divine Word Incarnate. Accordingly, if natural science has moved on to a new understanding of the natural world, why should not Christian philosophy and theology likewise move on to a new evolutionary understanding of the God-world relationship? In the remainder of his book, therefore, Henry traces the tangled history of early modern and contemporary natural science and then indicates how Christian philosophers and theologians can take advantage of this new way of thinking in natural science for their own research and reflection. He reviews the mechanistic worldview of Isaac Newton, for example, and shows how it influenced the theology of the times. In his ground-breaking text Principia Mathematica, Newton adopted the mechanistic worldview of the early Greek philosophers Democritus and Leucippus but explained it in terms of deterministic mathematical equations. He also distinguished between facts and hypotheses, theoretical interpretations of empirically known facts.11 The hypothesis allows one to distinguish between which facts are important and which are not. Yet clearly established facts have priority

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over hypotheses which are by definition fallible. For Newton himself, this mechanistic understanding of physical reality implicitly verified his antecedent Christian belief in God as Creator; for, a machine needs a designer.12 Moreover, God can in this way intervene in the workings of nature through miracles to correct periodic deficiencies in his mechanistic scheme. Later philosophers of science, of course, like Pierre Laplace, improved Newton’s mathematics and thereby effectively excluded any ongoing influence of God on the world. This change of methodology in natural science as a result produced a new understanding of the Christian God-world relationship, namely, deism. In the next chapter, Henry first sets forth three basic assumptions in Darwin’s theory of natural selection: (1) organisms produce far more offspring than can possibly survive; (2) members of the same species differ from each other in some ways; (3) some of these variations are passed on from one generation to another.13 Consequently, natural selection is indeed random but not chaotic; it is basically predictable.14 Admittedly, natural selection only deals with the extinction of the unfit, not with the growth and further development of the fit members of the species into a new species. But, as Gregor Mendel later made clear in his experiments on pea plants, randomness is statistically predictable in virtue of genetic structures that limit the possibilities of variation from one generation to the next and thus allow for the gradual evolution of one species into another.15 Henry then explains that contemporary Creation science, which stands in opposition to empirically based theories of the origin of species, is really bad science because its basic tenets are not proven empirically through observation and experiment. Instead, creation science still relies on an outdated Newtonian worldview in which God must periodically intervene to restore the proper working of the laws of nature.16 Likewise, it relies on a fundamentalist understanding of the creation account (i.e., the notion of creation ex nihilo) in Genesis 1.17 In chapter 6, Henry reviews the history of the philosophical understanding of the soul from Aristotle and Plato, to Aquinas and other theologians in the Middle Ages, to early modern times with thinkers like Descartes, Leibniz, Locke and Hume.18 Then he reviews the results of contemporary cognitive science, noting that, while human beings feel like subjects in their experience of the outer world, the objective existence of the soul cannot be empirically established.19 But in chapter 7 he finds that the Biblical understanding of the soul can still be “saved” in the light of the latest findings of cognitive science. Equivalently, Henry finds a philosophical middle-ground position to explain this new empirical research in an event- or process-oriented understanding of the soul (as opposed to the understanding of the soul as a continuously existing spiritual substance in classical metaphysics).20 For example, in contrast to classical metaphysics where the soul is conceived as the immaterial substantial form of a material body, Henry argues that within



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an event-ontology soul-events first influence brain-events and then bodilyevents. Likewise, events in the body first influence events in the brain and then decisions made by the soul. Accordingly, “[w]hen the body dies, the soul dies—unless both are resurrected by the power of God.”21 Belief in the resurrection of both body and soul by God is, of course, based on the testimony of Sacred Scripture, not contemporary cognitive science. Furthermore, he argues that, while cognitive science can claim that the internal workings of the soul and the internal mechanism of a computer are similar in terms of their mode of operation, still a computer has no freedom of choice and the soul always possesses some freedom vis-à-vis both the body and the brain.22 Finally, in chapter 8, Henry deals with the complex issue of behavioristic determinism versus free will in human psychology. J. B. Watson, the founder of the behaviorist school of psychology in the early 1900s, argued that that there is no way to prove empirically the existence of human consciousness and purpose. Hence, human behavior is strictly determined. ‘The causes are in the environment—the stimuli—and the results are human and animal behavior—the response.”23 Henry responds to that challenge from the behaviorists with a process- or systems-oriented approach to the mind and/or soul. That is, he conceives the soul or mind as a structured series of events rapidly succeeding one another rather than as an enduring spiritual substance, the unchanging form of the body. For, in this way, he can claim that the activity of the soul or mind is both deterministic and indeterminate at the same time—that it is heavily conditioned but not totally determined by past events in its life-history.24 At every new moment in its life-span, human consciousness is free to alter in some fashion the directionality of its decision-making power. Henry refers to the work of Sigmund Freud by way of confirmation of his hypothesis. For example, Freud treated irrational behavior as still in its own way goal-directed.25 That is, an individual may have made a conscious choice in the distant past on how to deal with abiding fears and anxieties. While that previous choice is now forgotten, it still determines the decision of the present moment in dealing with the same fears and anxieties.26 Henry also refutes the contention of the English philosopher David Hume in claiming that human beings only see a regular connection between two events but never directly experience causality at work between the two events.27 In contrast to Hume, Henry argues that human beings may not see but still actively feel the invisible working of causality in their ongoing interaction with the world around them.28 In similar fashion, human beings feel but otherwise never directly experience divine causality at work in themselves as individuals. God works internally by way of feeling-level persuasion rather than externally through audible command.29 In chapters 9 and 10, Henry summarizes and critiques two important developments in twentieth century natural science—that is, relativity theory and quantum mechanics. Here too he finds that science, properly understood,

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can contribute to a new and better understanding of the Christian God-world relationship than in the past. That is, he claims in chapter 9 that relativity theory, when properly understood, can contribute to a new sense of the historical character of the God-world relationship. Salvation history, in other words, is not ultimately timeless—that is, predetermined by an omnipotent and omniscient God, but is step-by-step determined by the contingent events recorded in the Bible. Thus Christian theologians no longer have to reconcile belief in a predetermined plan of God for the world of creation and an equally strong belief in human freedom of choice even in one’s relation to God. For, relativity theory claims that human measurement of space and time is dependent upon the relative velocity both of the observer and of the entity observed within a universe where everything is in motion. But, if the universe is instead a historical and time-bound reality, then God’s relation to the world of creation must likewise be historical and time-bound as the Bible itself attests. Then in chapter 10 he reviews the philosophical implications of quantum mechanics and their pertinence for interpretation of traditional Christian beliefs. In the light of the unpredictability discovered in the movement of subatomic particles at the quantum level of existence and activity in nature, the German physicist Werner Heisenberg in 1927 formulated what he called the uncertainty principle, namely, that one cannot precisely determine both the position and the momentum of a quantum particle at the same time. The better one knows the position of the particle, the lesser one knows about its momentum and vice versa.30 For example, Louis de Broglie proposed that electrons orbit the nucleus of an atom in specific wave patterns.31 Yet Ervin Schroedinger claimed that one cannot observe an electron without disturbing its orbit around the nucleus, hence, that one cannot predict where it will be detected at any given moment. Finally, Max Born concluded that the mathematics of statistical probability rather than that of Newtonian mechanics govern the field of quantum mechanics.32 To deal with this dilemma of having to affirm both the validity of the unchanging laws of Newtonian mechanics in ordinary human experience and the validity of the principles of statistical probability in quantum mechanics, Henry then sets forth a philosophical cosmology modeled on the process-oriented worldview of Alfred North Whitehead as sketched previously in chapter 2 of this book. At the same time, he makes clear that Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem applies to philosophy and theology as well as to mathematics: hence, “there is no rational theology or philosophy by which we understand the full truth about God or any other matter.”33 Henry then examines in chapter 11 current scientific theories on the origin of the universe, and in chapter 12 efforts by Christian philosophers and theologians to construct a Christian understanding of the doctrine of creation that takes into account the evolutionary character of the cosmic process. In chapter 11, for example, he notes that the Roman Catholic Church



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has accepted the contemporary scientific explanation of the beginning of the universe in terms of a Big Bang or primordial explosion of energy, provided that it does not deny belief in the existence of God as Creator or First Cause of the world of creation. For, in line with his second thesis noted earlier, “the science surrounding big bang astronomy is still so new that philosophical interpretations coming from science are not as yet firmly established.”34 For the moment, then, the Big Bang theory neither proves nor disproves the rational tenability of the Christian doctrine of creation. Henry further notes that in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries there were two basic models of the universe: a secular one in which the universe is infinite and eternal and a religious one in which the universe is finite and had a beginning.35 In the 1920s, however, the astronomer Edwin Hubble discovered that other galaxies of stars and planets are moving further and further away from the Milky Way, the galaxy within which earth and the solar system are located. Hence, there is good reason to claim that the universe is currently expanding. But, if that be the case, then the universe in past ages was smaller in size than it is right now. Furthermore, in 1970 two English theoretical physicists Roger Penrose and Stephen Hawking “proved that the general theory of relativity predicts a big bang origin of the universe from an infinitely small volume. Likewise, contemporary astronomy predicts that we should be able to observe this ancient and primordial explosion at the origin of the universe by means of the radiation generated at its beginning.”36 Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson, physicists and radio astronomers working at the Bell Laboratories in the United States, detected this low-grade radiation coming from everywhere in the universe and eventually realized that it must have come from the original Big Bang. In 1990 their conclusion was confirmed by the cosmic background explorer satellite (COBE).37 There is every reason then to conclude that the universe will continue to expand in the future; hence, that it had a beginning in the very distant past. The further question, of course, is whether the initial singularity or Big Bang occurred by chance or by design. For that explosion of energy in all directions would never have been sustained without a remarkable consonance of forces and constants that came into play immediately after the Big Bang.38 The scientific explanation of that occurrence comes in two forms: the weak anthropic principle and the strong anthropic principle. The weak anthropic principle simply argues from fact to possibility; it happened; therefore, it could have happened, presumably by chance at any time. The strong anthropic principle, however, argues that conditions present at the beginning of the universe were such that sooner or later the cosmic process would produce finite entities (e.g., human beings) who could observe the cosmic process and in some measure understand it.39 As Henry notes in chapter 12 of his book, a Christian philosopher or theologian should be careful not to claim that the current scientific understanding

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of the Big Bang proves the existence of God as the architect of the cosmic process. But that same philosopher or theologian should offer a philosophical cosmology that can be used to support Christian belief in the creation of the world by God. It must, in other words, make good sense both to natural scientists and to educated people generally. Here Henry makes a choice once again for the process-oriented philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead and his successor Charles Hartshorne rather than for the metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas and his successors because Whitehead and Hartshorne better understood the evolutionary character of the cosmic process. I too favor the metaphysical scheme of Whitehead over the classical metaphysics of Aquinas and the scholastic tradition, but I consciously adapt it to the Christian belief system in a way that Henry in my judgment does not. For the moment, however, I simply analyze Henry’s understanding of a process-oriented approach to the Christian God-world relation. Most Christians, says Henry, believe that God created the world out of nothing (ex nihilo).40 They base that belief on the way that the book of Genesis depicts God bringing creation into being through a series of divine commands (Genesis 1). Henry, however, prefers the text of the Prologue to John’s Gospel (John 1:1–18). For therein God is described as tripersonal (Father, Son, and Holy Spirit), not unipersonal as in Genesis, even though the Holy Spirit is named only by implication (i.e., grace and the Spirit being the same). But he concedes that the social nature of God as a society or community of persons is vague within Whitehead’s metaphysical scheme.41 For, in his view, the Bible should not be interpreted as literally God’s word but as the work of human beings under divine inspiration.42 He likewise addresses the issue of the healing miracles of Jesus, in particular, the raising of Lazarus (John 11:1–44). Henry claims that Lazarus was resuscitated, not raised from the dead, since Lazarus lived for some time afterward and presumably died a natural death.43 Resurrection of the body, as Henry understands it from a Whiteheadian perspective, means that death destroys the human being, both body and soul, but that God recreates the person and elevates that person to a higher-order state of existence and activity, based on God’s recollection of the entire pattern of that person’s life from birth to death.44 Whitehead himself, however, is ambivalent on that subject. Objective immortality within the divine life is indeed guaranteed not only for human beings but for all the other finite entities of this world since the pattern of events in this world is moment by moment being integrated into the divine memory (the consequent nature of God). Yet subjective immortality is only hinted at in the following cryptic statement: “In everlastingness, immediacy (the subjectivity of a human being from moment to moment?) is reconciled with objective immortality.”45 So Henry is on weak ground here. Perhaps he should have modestly revised Whitehead’s metaphysics so as better to explain his own beliefs about subjective immortality. For, as Whitehead makes clear in the



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introduction to Process and Reality, every philosophical cosmology is provisional and subject to revision in the light of new empirical data or an even better scheme.46 In the last chapter of his book titled “Faith and Reason,” Henry summarizes the overall argument of the book. In line with his first thesis for the relation between Christianity and science at the beginning of the book, he notes how ancient and medieval Christian theologians used models of physical reality drawn from the science of the day because these models seemed to correspond to statements in the Bible: “The Hebrew God, transformed and made rational, all-powerful and all-knowing by Greek philosophy, became orthodox theology.”47 Then in the early modern period, Christian theologians adapted the deterministic image of the world from Newtonian mechanics to the traditional belief in God as Creator and Sustainer of the universe. Finally, in the nineteenth century liberal Christian theologians adapted Darwin’s theory of natural selection to Biblical understanding of the Kingdom of God as breaking into this world with the preaching of Jesus. All these scientific models of reality, however, have been subject to revision as a result of further discoveries in the natural and social sciences. Hence, as Henry pointed out in his second thesis, Christian theologians should be cautious about “baptizing” a scientific model of reality that might someday be significantly revised or even rejected. Henry notes that in Antiquity and in the Middle Ages four positions on the relation between religion and science were in circulation. Tertullian argued for a strict separation of religion and science. Augustine claimed that with antecedent belief in God faith and reason can be combined. Aquinas proposed that reason can be used to confirm faith. Averroȅs saw no incompatibility between reason and faith although he conceded that they appeal to different audiences.48 Henry then states his understanding of the relation between religion and science, namely, that a deeper understanding of the relationship between religion and science is invariably based upon some measure of active participation in and a feeling-level appreciation for the strengths and weaknesses of both disciplines.49 Precisely for this reason, he is very critical of Protestant neo-Orthodoxy with its appeal to the priority of revelation over reason. Instead, he finds Martin Buber’s distinction between I-It and I-Thou relations very insightful.50 An I-It relation governs scientific theories and theological doctrines which seek to describe the world objectively. A feeling-oriented personal experience governs I-Thou relations with the people and things of this world and with God. “It is the I-Thou relation that determines the It structures of science and theology. I-Thou encounter provides the authority for distinguishing between competing theological or scientific theories.”51 There is some danger here in over-emphasizing subjective feeling over objective rational reflection. But Henry finds indirect confirmation for his approach to science and religion in the philosophy of Alfred

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North Whitehead who claims that all entities have some subjectivity—that is, a feeling-level responsiveness to other entities in its environment.52 Yet importantly Henry also adds: “Process thought is also an abstraction, an It structure. It has value, as does big bang science, only as it fulfils our scientific and religious experience. Therefore, it is dependent upon our encounters with the world and God and should be replaced if it loses its esthetic and religious function.”53 Henry provides a striking example of the ontological priority of I-Thou relations over I-It relations in a mother’s experience of her unborn baby and the baby’s experience of its mother during the long months of pregnancy: “The developing human does not see its mother objectively even in the latest stage of pregnancy, because the mother surrounds and encloses her. The mother does not see the unborn baby for similar reasons (except perhaps indirectly in a sonogram). Yet both are bound in strong, primary, causal, caring relationship.”54 Similarly, Christian belief in the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist is rationally based on the theory of transubstantiation, consubstantiation, or transfiguration. But that belief is empirically confirmed in and through the felt presence of Jesus to the believer at the moment of receiving the sacrament. Henry ends the book with the following summary comment: “The source of science is the real world that exists objectively on its own independently of our observation. We are part of this world and experience it. . . . The source of religion is God, who exists objectively and independently of our observation. The religions of Judaism and Christianity claim that God reveals God’s self to humans and humans experience God.”55 The claims of science are thus grounded in abstract mathematical formulas. The claims of the religions of Judaism and Christianity are grounded in the various interpretations of sacred texts that were themselves written in common sense language and have to be read like a historical narrative. The broader truth-claims of both science and religion, therefore, are provisional and open to revision. Even so, scientists and people of faith must try to understand and respect one another’s truth-claims. Hence, they need to find common ground for their discussion with one another in a commonly accepted philosophical system that uses categories and principles intelligible to both sides. For Henry, some form of process philosophy would seem to be a more suitable vehicle to achieve that goal than the Metaphysics of Being originally set forth by Aristotle and Plato and later perpetuated by Thomas Aquinas and subsequent philosophers and theologians in the scholastic tradition. NOTES 1. Granville C. Henry, Christianity and the Images of Science (Macon, GA: Smyth & Helwys, 1998), 1–2. 2.  Ibid., 4.



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 3. Ibid., 21.  4. Ibid., 16–17.   5.  Ibid., 18. See also Isaiah 40:22; Ezekiel 7:22; Revelation 7:1, 20:8.   6.  Ibid., 27. See also 1 Chronicles 16:30 and Psalm 93:1, where the earth is described as immobile by divine decree.  7. Ibid., 28.  8. Ibid.  9. Ibid., 31. 10.  Ibid., 46. 11.  Ibid., 55–56. 12.  Ibid., 59–60. 13.  Ibid., 66–67. 14.  Ibid., 77. 15.  Ibid., 69–74. 16.  Ibid., 82–85. 17.  Ibid., 85–90. 18.  Ibid., 93–100. 19.  Ibid., 100–108. 20.  Ibid., 111–16. 21.  Ibid., 116. 22.  Ibid., 117–20. 23.  Ibid., 124. See also John B. Watson, “Psychology as the Behaviorist Views It,” Psychological Review 20 (1913). 24.  Ibid., 127–28. 25.  Ibid., 125. 26.  Ibid., 127. 27.  Ibid., 132. 28.  Ibid., 133–34. 29.  Ibid., 134–35. 30.  Ibid., 158. 31. Ibid. 32.  Ibid., 158–59. 33.  Ibid., 165. 34.  Ibid., 176. 35.  Ibid., 179. 36.  Ibid., 181. 37.  Ibid., 182. 38.  Ibid., 183–84. 39.  Ibid., 185. 40.  Ibid., 189. 41.  Ibid., 190. See also Joseph A. Bracken, S.J., Society and Spirit: A Trinitarian Cosmology (Selingsgrove, NJ: Susquehanna University Press, 1991). 42. Henry, Christianity and the Images of Science, 196–97. 43.  Ibid., 197–98. 44.  Ibid., 199–200. 45. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 351. 46. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 4. 47. Henry, Christianity and the Images of Science, 203. 48.  Ibid., 206–207. 49.  Ibid., 208–209. 50.  Cf., e.g., Martin Buber, I and Thou, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Scribner’s, 1970), 54. 51. Henry, Christianity and the Images of Science, 211. 52.  Ibid., 211, 213. 53.  Ibid., 212. 54.  Ibid., 215. 55.  Ibid., 216.

Part III

REASON AND REVELATION IN DEALING WITH THE ENVIRONMENTAL CRISIS

Chapter Six

A Systems-Oriented Environmental Ethic

Holmes Rolston III, philosopher of science at the University of Colorado for many years, was among the first in the field of environmental ethics to recognize the responsibility of human beings for the survival and prosperity of the nonhuman world on this earth.1 For, the previous understanding of physical reality espoused by natural scientists from the beginning of the seventeenth century until the present day has been heavily mechanistic in its mode of operation, governed by quantitatively measurable laws of nature. Given this advanced understanding of physical reality, human beings as the sole rational species on the face of the earth have been consistently thought to be free to make use of nature’s resources in any way suitable to their interests and desires. In 1985, however, Rolston published a book titled Environmental Ethics and in 2012 issued a revised version of the book with the title A New Environmental Ethics: The Next Millenium for Life on Earth.2 In an introductory chapter of this second book, he reminds the reader that for the first time in the 3.5 billion years of the earth’s existence, a single species can jeopardize the future of the entire planet because of its preoccupation with its interests and desires with little or no heed to the overall environment.3 Yet, claims Rolston, there are promising signs of human awakening to the seriousness of the problem. The extensive damage to the natural environment of the Gulf Coast by a massive oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 vividly reminded Americans of the dangers of drilling for oil underwater as well as in ecologically sensitive areas on land. Global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions and deforestation has produced noticeable effects on weather conditions in the United States. Conferences sponsored by the United Nations have focused on sustainable development—that is, 87

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“development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”4 The Environmental Protection Agency in the United States officially endorsed a policy of environmental justice for racial minorities, the poor, and developing justice in 1992 under the leadership of President Bill Clinton. Unmonitored toxic waste from various sources can contaminate the drinking water of large numbers of people in nearby cities. The issue of endangered species and its consequences for necessary biodiversity on planet earth has grown in importance in recent years. The movement of ecofeminism has arisen with its persistent claim of a close linkage between male dominance over women and the degradation of nature. Finally, Peter Singer with his book Animal Liberation in 1975 and Tom Regan with his book The Case for Animal Rights (1983/2004) have added still another dimension to the analysis of human relations with the non-human world. In brief, says Rolston, the issue of an environmental ethic can no longer be ignored.5 Admittedly, human beings have already “domesticated” (i.e., rearranged for human purposes) a great deal of the natural landscape of this world. Hence, there is no way artificially to set off against one another nature and human culture or society. “If nature means absolutely pristine nature, totally unaffected by human activities, past or present, there is relatively little remaining on earth. If culture means totally culturally de-natured, reconstructed, civilized with no dependence on natural systems, there is none of that on Earth either. What is all over the landscapes is nature linked with human identity. Environmental ethics is as social as it is natural.”6 Scientists talk about a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, as a result of which human activity has become the dominant force in the workings of physical reality on earth. But that raises serious philosophical issues. Is the natural world value-less apart from the values which human beings give it in pragmatically dealing with their environment? Likewise, what restraints should be placed on those who thus manage the natural environment for the rest of us? Rolston believes that agreement on environmental policy should be negotiated through “a participatory community, a parliament where each advocacy group pushes its own agenda always realizing and respecting the interests of the whole.”7 This proposal fits quite neatly, of course, within an overall systems-oriented approach to reality in which systems cooperate with rather than oppose one another to advance a higher-order system inclusive of both subsystems. For all living species but especially for human beings, nature and culture are inseparable. Each conditions the other. Hence, an environmental ethic is not just about the preservation of wildlands, but about human beings at home on their landscapes, humans in their culture residing also in nature.8 Yet, beyond protecting the natural environment for one another’s appreciation and enjoyment, there is a higher ethical view at stake in human



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management of the world of nature. Rather than using our minds and morals, hands and brain, as survival tools for defending a strictly human form of life, the better answer is when the human mind forms an intelligible view of the whole and defends ideals of life in all their forms.9 That is, what is needed by humans in dealing with the natural world is a new form of altruism in which there is a concern not only for humanity, one’s own form of life, but for all other forms of life within the global whole, the ecosystem proper to life on earth. For the well-being of the ecosystem is itself dependent upon the active participation of all its constitutive parts or members. In a chapter dedicated to animals other than humans and their value not only for human beings, but also in and for themselves, Rolston claims that an animal in the wild values its own life for what it is in itself. Yet it inhabits an ecosystem on which its life-support depends, and other animals may in turn depend on it.10 Farm animals raised for human consumption and domestic animals (pets) likewise have value in and for themselves. But they clearly depend more upon human care than upon the surrounding environment for their well-being and survival. In any event, the source of intrinsic value for all animals (human beings included) is their own subjectivity, their individual sensitivity to one another and to the environment. Greater awareness of the individuality of animals, however, can ironically generate tension between advocates of animal rights and environmentalists.11 Animal rights advocates who want to protect the lives of individual higher-order animals that feel both pleasure and pain find themselves opposed by environmentalists who claim that this other group is not always acting in the best interests of the overall environment and all the lesser-order forms of life to be found within it (e.g., less sensate animal species, insects, microbes, plants). So these two groups must find a suitable compromise in dealing with more complicated environmental issues. Rolston likewise raises the contested issue of human beings hunting for nonhuman animals living in the wild. Is this simply another instance of the predator-prey relationship within nature? Or, given that meat for human consumption is readily available from domestic animals raised for that purpose, is hunting for sport rather than food, still ethically permissible? Rolston is skeptical about the permissibility of hunting simply for sport, thus siding with the animal rights advocates on this point. But he sides with the environmentalists on the related issue of saving animals from pain and death as a result of an unfortunate accident. Human beings should not endanger the principle of natural selection in the world of nature. Saving weaker members of an animal species out of pity for their suffering can result in overpopulation of that species with consequences for the well-being and survival of the entire species. Only if an animal is suffering because of human degradation of its natural environment, then in Rolston’s judgment human beings do have a moral obligation to come to the aid of that animal in its suffering.12

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The issue of animal rights, accordingly, is not as easy to resolve as it might initially seem to be. Likewise, concerning the treatment of domesticated animals, Rolston once again takes a middle-ground position. Human beings may raise animals for human consumption, but how the animals are raised and how they are slaughtered should be humane. So-called factory farming in which animals are force-fed or kept in cages to improve the quality of the meat thereby produced is unethical and should be prevented as far as possible by government oversight and regulation. The profit motive for the farm owner and the pleasure of the consumer should not be allowed to override respect for the animal as an entity that shares life with human beings.13 Even more is the case in the treatment of domestic pets. They should never be mistreated by their human owners.14 For the same reason, Rolston admits the moral ambiguity involved in keeping animals in zoos. On the one hand, the animals are deprived of their natural freedom in the manner naturally suited to them. On the other hand, zoos allow human beings, especially those living in heavily urban areas, to have firsthand contact with and come to appreciate the broader world of nature as distinct from their own lives in contemporary society. Finally, Rolston acknowledges that much is gained for human welfare by using animals for scientific research and as a test for the potentially harmful effects of experimental drugs. But this has to be carefully balanced against the pain thereby inflicted on the animal. Thus only certain animal species should be used for scientific experiments; experimenting on mammals should be legally prohibited.15 Still, other forms of life exist besides human beings and other higher-order animals: for example, lower-order animals, insects, microbes, and plants. “Over 96% of species are invertebrates or plants. A deeper respect for life must value more directly all living things and the generative processes that sustain life at all its levels, from the genetic to the global.”16 That is, lowerorder life-forms can survive without human beings and other higher-order animal species, but the reverse is not true. Invertebrates—animals without a backbone—far outnumber vertebrates. As a result, invertebrates provide food for vertebrates and plants provide food for both vertebrates and invertebrates. In addition, tiny organisms (fungi) recycle organic waste, and insects pollinate many plants that provide food for higher-order animals.17 Focusing on plant life, Rolston first notes that a plant is not “an experiencing subject” like a self-aware adult human being, but it is alive and in its own way self-actualizing.18 This would seem to indicate that a more limited form of subjectivity is nevertheless at work in plants in various ways. For example, they reproduce themselves and resist dying. They repair internal injuries to their parts or members. They follow a specific pattern of development and thus store information in their genes. Plants do not have specific ends-in-view or goals; yet like other more complex organisms they exhibit a



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botanical identity that endures over time. Hence, they have objective value for the preservation of a well-balanced environment. Human beings often envision plants simply as a source of nutrition or as decorative items in gardens and landscapes. But this line of thought is shortsighted. For, plants in their way not only contribute to the overall well-being of the environment but also are themselves valuing agents. They evaluate their different sources of nutrition and respond accordingly since they too like human beings survive based on natural selection.19 Genes at work in plants as well as in human beings “have substantial solution-generating capacities.”20 Genetic engineering is going on spontaneously in all living organisms, not just human beings. For exotic plants (i.e., plants that are not native to a given physical environment), Rolston asks whether such plants should be weeded out or allowed to grow to enhance biological diversity. He concludes that one should look to the empirical effects of their introduction into an ecosystem. If these plants are invasive, aggressively crowding out other species native to the environment, then they should be weeded out. But, if the new species adapts well to the environment and seems to enhance it by its unique features, it should be allowed to grow and become part of the ecosystem. Rolston concludes this lengthy chapter on organisms, large and small, with two recommendations. First, he urges greater use of the term “biocentrism.” Biocentrism refers to an ethics of respect for life but with a focus on all living beings, not just an ethic centered on humans (anthropocentrism), nor one directed only to the higher animals, who can suffer pains and pleasures.21 For, in his mind, each life-form has its own excellence. Plants, for example, can photosynthesize but animals cannot; yet all animals depend for survival on photosynthesis. Certain species of trees last thousands of years. In brief, all forms of life are interdependent on one another for their wellbeing and survival. Yet, says Rolston, not all life-forms are of equal value. Human beings are part of the web of life. But they are at the same time radically different from all other earthly forms of life and have a natural right to survive by killing lower-order animals and plant life to survive and flourish. Yet human beings should still respect limits in satisfying their needs and desires at the expense of other life-forms. Cutting down a sequoia tree with a lifespan of thousands of years simply for its available timber is a violation of the principle of biocentrism. Second, he recommends that attention be given in the first place to the objective value of the different life-forms in and of themselves, but he comes to that conclusion only after reviewing at some length the arguments of those who instead find the origin of meaning and value in the valuer, the one making an evaluation (a human being or some other sentient animal). Rolston nicely summarizes his own position in the final paragraph of the chapter on organisms:

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Humans are not so much lighting up value in a merely potentially valuable world, as they are psychologically joining ongoing planetary natural history in which there is value wherever there is positive creativity. While such creativity can be present in subjects with their interests and preferences, it can also be present objectively in living organisms with their lives defended, and in species that defend an identity over time, and generate the storied achievements of natural history. . . . What’s going on is life persisting in the midst of its perpetual perishing. Humans ought to respect such life.22

Human beings may wish that mosquitoes and rattlesnakes did not exist. But do human beings have a right to question the objective value of other life-forms when they too are contingent participants in the broader socially constituted reality of the ecosystem?23 Rolston shows the same systems-oriented approach to reality in his chapter on species and biodiversity. That is, he recognizes that some biologists consider the notion of species to be nothing more than the bottom-level entry in the standard division of life-forms into kingdoms, phyla, classes, orders, families, genera, and species. But whereas all the others are mentally derived, species are different. Species naturally reproduce and thus have a reality not possessed by the others. Species conserve a biological identity and thus are more valuable than the individual member of the species. Species are the real units of evolution since they are the entities that specialize, become adapted, or shift their adaptation.24 Admittedly, the exact definition of a species, what makes it different from other species, is elusive. But if its members interbreed and their offspring turn out to be fertile, capable of reproducing the same kind of entity as themselves, then they are evidently a species different from other species. They are life-forms that in principle can last over millions of years, albeit with key modifications (e.g., adaptations to the environment), as needed for survival. Should species then be deliberately saved from extinction by human beings? Once again, the answer is complicated. One line of thought would be to save only those animal and plant species that contribute to human survival and well-being. But, while their usefulness to human beings is clear in dealing with some species, it is not clear in dealing with others. Furthermore, human needs evolve and different kinds of animal and plant species may be unexpectedly needed to meet those needs. Likewise, the loss of a significant number of animal and plant species will surely upset the ecosystem on which human beings also depend. Finally, human beings acquire a richer relationship to the world of nature if they protect some species because of their special character or genetic identity (e.g., butterflies and whales). In any event, a focus on the preservation of animal and plant species irrespective of their value for human use and consumption provides a counterbalance to the strong focus on the individualism that is so characteristic of



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Western culture. “In an evolutionary ecosystem, it is not mere individuality that counts. The individual presents, or re-presents anew, a species in each subsequent generation. It is a token of a type, and the type is more important than the token.”25 To kill a particular animal is to stop a life of a few years or decades, while other members of the species in question survive. But to exterminate an entire species is to “shut down a story of many millennia, and leave no future possibilities.”6 Yet how much should the protection of endangered species be required by law? Human beings tend to evade legal regulations. So governments, both local and national, should provide economic incentives (e.g., reduced taxes) for observance of the laws. But in the end, care for the environment is a public good and will only be effective when there is an agreed consensus among those affected to make it happen. Yet even here care should be taken not to overregulate the needs of the environment without attention to the legitimate rights of individual property owners. Thus governments have to find a balance between legitimate property rights and concern for the needs of the environment. Here one might object that in the history of the evolutionary process on this earth some animal and plant species have become extinct but have thereby indirectly provided space for new species to arise that are better equipped to deal with environmental change. Catastrophic extinctions like those in the Permian and Cretaceous geological eras prepared the way for even more diversity and even more complex forms of life (e.g., human beings and other mammals). But there is a key difference between natural and humanly caused extinctions. Humanly caused or anthropogenic extinctions have nothing to do with natural selection. “Hundreds of thousands of species will perish because of culturally altered environments that are radically different from the spontaneous environment in which such species were selected and in which they sometimes go extinct.”27 Furthermore, natural extinction represents more a natural pruning of the tree of life; humanly caused extinctions like the destruction of rainforests and damage to coral reefs are purely negative with no positive outcomes. Rolston likewise distinguishes between protecting individual species and protecting ecodiversity in a given environment. An environmental ethic must include attention to both although in the end protecting the ecodiversity of the environment is more important than protecting individual species especially if it would involve expenditure of time and energy by human beings to “save” species by transplanting them to another more favorable climate. Yet how does one measure biodiversity in a given environment? The number of species and their abundance are evident factors: likewise, whether a given environment is uniform or diverse in terms of rainfall, temperature, degrees above sea level, make a difference in terms of biodiversity. “Diversity in ecosystems is not a tight, organismic unity; the integration is more open within

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a complementing community. Each species has its own integrity in its niche, and each is webbed into the larger community.”28 Biodiversity is a natural good worth preserving even apart from its value for human beings. Yet at the same time some measure of biodiversity may have to be sacrificed for the sake of more important human goals and values. Accordingly, compromises have to be negotiated between conservationists, real estate developers, and city planners. But compromises have to be carefully worked out so that genuine respect for the integrity of nature is guaranteed. Human beings must in this way acknowledge their limited role in the overall web of life. In other words, human beings should value and try to conserve the integrity of the world of nature, not because it makes them feel good about themselves, but because it is a morally responsible choice, irrespective of whether or not they benefit from it.29 Rolston carries this same philosophical premise that the overarching value of the system as a whole is greater than the value to be attached to its constituent parts or members in his analysis of ecosystems. He first notes, however, that the notion of an ecosystem is still poorly defined. Ecosystems are considered persistent if they last for long periods with little change in species and their interrelationships. Other ecosystems are termed cyclical since they return quickly to the same stable condition after unexpected perturbation; others simply retain the same trajectory or directionality but allow for change and further development as a result of recurring cycles of perturbation and stability. More recently, ecologists have concluded that ecosystems are much more likely to be open-ended and thus unstable: “There are ordered regularities (seasons returning, the hydrologic cycle, acorns making oak trees, squirrels feeding on the acorns) mixed with episodic irregularities (droughts, fires, lightning killing an oak, mutations in the acorns).”30 This would seem to signify that there is no internal order within an ecosystem. It is just the de facto result of all the events taking place within it. Yet other ecologists (Rolston among them) believe that ecosystems have an internal principle of self-organization that continues to restore order after various contingencies. Rolston traces this holistic approach to life in the community back to Aristotle,31 but then further comments: “There is little reason to count one pattern (the organism) as real and another (the ecosystem) as unreal. Any level is real if there is significant downward causation. Thus the atom is real because that pattern shapes the behavior of electrons; the cell because that pattern shapes the behavior of amino acids; the organism because that pattern shapes the behavior of hearts and lungs; the community because the niche shapes the morphology and behavior of the foxes within it.”32 Should then human beings see the influence of these patterns in nature as a paradigm for the way that they should live their own lives? Critics object that ecosystems are too loosely organized to provide a pattern for human activity. Rolston responds: “To doubt communities because they



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are not organismic individuals is to look at one level for what is appropriate at another. One should look for a matrix of interconnections, for creative stimulus and open-ended potential. . . . We must think more systemically, and less organismically.”33 Yet both systems and organisms are totalities or qualitative wholes. That is, in each case, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts or members. Rolston seems to be implicitly saying the same thing: “The system is a kind of field with characteristics as vital for life as any property contained within particular organisms.”34 Organisms defend their survival; ecosystems promote new arrivals—that is, speciation, new kinds of organisms. “Ecosystemic order is a comprehensive, complex, fertile order just because it integrates (with some openness) the know-how of many diverse organisms and species.”35 As Rolston sees it, for this reason human beings should respect and seek to preserve ecosystems as higher-order socially constituted entities in their own right. Yet how is one to balance regard for human well-being with concern for the environment and the protection of ecosystems? A new academic discipline has arisen to address that question, ecological economics—that is, the interdependence of human economic systems and natural ecosystems. Classical economic theory focused on labor and capital and thus paid little attention to land and natural resources as having any real value beyond their instrumental value for economic growth and increased consumption.36 Cost-benefit analysis is the usual procedure with an appeal to government regulation only as a safeguard against market failures. Environmental thinking that is focused on economics thus poses risks to the natural environment: reduction of biodiversity, pollution of air, water, and soil. Furthermore, this kind of environmental economics affects people as well as the natural world; it often makes the rich richer and the poor poorer. Protecting one’s resources should involve protecting the “natural capital” of the environment—that is, the flow of valuable ecosystem goods or services into the future: “A forest provides a stock of trees or a river provides a stock of water or fish that can be sustainable indefinitely. Natural capital also provides services like recycling wastes or water catchment and erosion control.”37 Neglecting such natural capital will over time deplete the capacity of the environment to support human life. Poor people will suffer much more than the rich from the degradation of the environment. So there is a moral responsibility on the part of wealthier nations and rich people within those nations to care for the needs of the poor in whatever country they exist. For, the natural capital of the ecosystem is for all to enjoy. Moreover, human culture depends upon a healthy environment for its continued growth and development. “Humans today depend on air flow, water cycles, sunshine, nitrogen-fixation, decomposition bacteria, fungi, the ozone layer, food chains, insect pollination, soils, earthworms, climates, oceans, and genetic materials. . . . In any future that we can presently envision, some sort

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of inclusive environmental fitness is required of even the most advanced culture.”38 Beginning in 1964, wilderness areas unaffected by human management and control have been set aside in the United States by acts of Congress, But for many critics, the notion of wilderness is nothing more than a state of mind for urban dwellers looking for a refreshing change of scenery. Rolston, however, objects: “There are, no doubt, many things going on in the wilderness that we yet fail to see, because we do not have the constructs [concepts] with which to see them. That does not mean, however, that there is no wilderness there, nor that these are not going on independently of us, both our knowing and our doing.”39 The same critics, however, are unconvinced: “There is no nature to which humans have not set their hands, developing, managing, modifying, polluting it. On every continent, the main effort for thousands of years has been development seeking better to manage nature.”40 Yet much of what is designated as wilderness areas in the United States is at a high altitude, cold, arid, and difficult to traverse on foot. Human beings visit these areas but do not normally live there. Hence, Americans “can and ought to set aside wild areas for what they are in themselves, areas which we try to manage as little as possible, or to manage human uses of them so as to let nature take its course, as far as we can.”41 Likewise, human beings should try to restore landscapes that have been severely damaged by human negligence even if complete restoration is impossible: “Restorations are seldom as good as the original. The diversity of species may not be there, nor the complexity of ecosystemic interrelations.”42 But, with careful human management, nature can heal itself. “The sun shines, the rains fall, the forest grows. Birds arrive on their own and build their nests.”43 Spontaneous nature returns, but only if human beings respect how nature works and do not try to speed up or otherwise change the restoration process. In this way, human beings can make restitution for what they have thoughtlessly destroyed in the past. A properly managed ecosystem will protect natural values, as well as support cultural values; actively supporting such a balance between natural and cultural values should be the aim of an environmental ethic. “Such health is best had by favoring ecosystem management that, so to speak, ‘goes with the flow,’ rather than by high-tech management.”44 Rolston ends the book with a chapter providing his well-researched response to key environmental issues. He first notes that in the past ethics has been preoccupied with inter-human issues, people finding a way to relate morally to other people. Ethics, however, now must be concerned with the overall health of the planet since it is home to several million species besides our own. For, human beings are a unique species precisely because only human beings can reflect upon and consciously deal with these complex issues



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arising out of the interdependence of life-forms on one another in order collectively to survive and prosper. But for the same reason, no other species threatens the overall health of the planet as much as we human beings do. That is, we are technologically advanced but morally retarded in terms of our collective ability to restrain our needs and desires. “Consumer capitalism transmutes a once-healthy pattern of desires into gluttony and avarice. With escalating opportunities for consumption, driven by markets in search of profits, we need more self-discipline than comes naturally.”45 Second, Rolston is critical of the economic policies currently associated with global capitalism. It is too simplistic to think that first-world lifestyles can be spread to economically developing countries simply through free trade on a global basis with little or no governmental regulation.46 Yet, if already prosperous nations out of concern for the environment impose environmental restrictions on the production and distribution of goods and services in their own countries, they often find themselves disadvantaged in terms of world trade vis-à-vis developing countries that respect few if any environmental safeguards in their production and distribution of good and services both at home and in international markets. Hence, a strong temptation for economically developed countries is simply to let free trade reign and ignore the consequences for environmental well-being elsewhere in the world. Thereby, of course, the rich get richer and the poor get poorer even in their own relatively prosperous economies.47 Still another problem facing economists is the increasing growth of the human race in terms of population. “Currently, about 80 million persons are added to Earth’s population each year. A frequent argument [among economists] is that getting such persons fed is impossible without development.”48 But, argues Rolston, isn’t that strategy ultimately short-sighted? For, trying to feed an increasingly bigger population, unless carefully managed, still tends to produce deforestation, soil losses, loss in biodiversity, all of which over time contribute to further pollution of the atmosphere. Furthermore, feeding an ever-growing world population means not only producing enough food but also distributing it equitably to meet the needs of the poor as well as those of the affluent. Yet there is one often overlooked solution to the problem of overpopulation, namely, better education for women. “When women have sufficient education, they have knowledge and power enough to make informed decisions about reproduction, less dependence on their men for support, now having better workplace skills themselves, and better overall health.”49 Rolston concedes that there may be no single answer to the complex issue of climate change. For, “[t]here are intergenerational issues, distributional issues, concerns about merit, justice, benevolence, about voluntary and involuntary risks. . . . There are opportunities for denial, procrastination,

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self-deception, hypocrisy, free-riding, cheating and corruption. Individual and national self-interest is at odds with collective global interests.”50 In principle, an international governing body with the power to enforce its regulations could effectively deal with the problem of climate change. But that is also at present not likely to happen, given cultural diversity, national heritages, and freedom of self-determination on the part of national governments and their citizens. In addition, there are legitimate concerns about simply entrusting the management of the environment to a select group of experts. For, experts can be found on both sides of any controversial issue. Yet, if effective action regarding the environment is indefinitely postponed into the future, then the costs to human beings all over the world, whether in developed or still developing countries, will be far greater. Hence, something must be done. “Humans have proved capable of advanced skills never dreamed of in our ancient past—flying jet planes, walking on the moon, building the Internet, decoding our own genome, setting aside wilderness areas, restoring endangered species, and designating world biosphere spheres.”51 Perhaps as a first step, we human beings must move to a broader understanding of the world around us in which moral issues and religiously inspired goals and values likewise play an important role. That is, only when the Earth is regarded as a sacred reality, that which is to be valued above and beyond all life-forms, our own included, will those working in environmental ethics effectively move beyond an exclusive focus on strictly human problems and issues. The Earth is not simply the stage on which human beings play out their individual goals and values. Instead, human beings should see the Earth itself as “the source of value, and therefore value-able, able to produce value itself.”52 Human beings, accordingly, should find personal self-fulfillment in and through active participation in a socially constructed world greater than themselves as individuals.53 Later in this book, I will indicate how a panentheistic understanding of the God-world relationship and an open-ended systems-oriented approach to physical reality could motivate contemporary human beings to move in that direction. But for the moment I call attention to the way that Rolston handles the issue of ecosystems as organically constituted realities in their own right (see notes 33–37). That is, if various kinds of organisms make up an ecosystem the ecosystem is itself a mega-organism, a qualitative whole greater than the sum of its parts. The pattern of existence and activity within each of the parts affects the pattern of existence and activity within the whole, and vice versa. The key to a sustainable ecosystem is then first the recognition of a universal pattern at work in all its subordinate parts or systems, and then using it to adjust the relationship of subordinate parts and wholes throughout the ecosystem.54



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NOTES   1.  See, for example, Holmes Rolston III, “Is There an Ecological Ethic,” Ethics: An International Journal for Social and Political Philosophy 85 (1975): 93–109.  2. Ibid., Environmental Ethics: Duties to and Values in the Natural World (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988); A New Environmental Ethic: The Next Millenium for Life on Earth (New York: Routledge, 2012).  3. Ibid., New Enviromental Ethic, 1–2.  4. Ibid., 6.  5. Ibid., 19–27.  6. Ibid., 42.  7. Ibid., 45.  8. Ibid., 47.  9. Ibid., 58. 10.  Ibid., 63. 11.  Ibid., 66–68. 12.  Ibid., 68–75. 13.  Ibid., 75–82. 14.  Ibid., 81–82. 15.  Ibid., 86–89. 16.  Ibid., 93. 17.  Ibid., 95. 18.  Ibid., 96. 19.  Ibid., 97–98. N.B.: This line of thought on Rolston’s part is very close to Whitehead’s and my own understanding of actual entities, momentary self-constituting subjects of experience, as the basic constituents of physical reality (see also, chapter 2). 20.  Ibid., 103. 21.  Ibid., 110. 22.  Ibid., 122. 23.  Ibid., 121. 24.  Ibid., 128. 25.  Ibid., 133. 26.  Ibid., 135. 27.  Ibid., 140. 28.  Ibid., 146. 29.  Ibid., 148–54. 30.  Ibid., 161. 31.  Ibid., 163. Reference is to Aristotle’s Metaphysics 1045a10: “The whole is different from the sum of its parts.” 32. Ibid. 33.  Ibid., 166–67. 34.  Ibid., 167. 35. Ibid. 36.  Ibid., 168–69. 37.  Ibid., 170. 38.  Ibid., 173. 39.  Ibid., 177–78. 40.  Ibid., 178. 41. Ibid. 42.  Ibid., 183. 43.  Ibid., 184. 44.  Ibid., 188. 45.  Ibid., 198. 46.  Ibid., 199. 47.  Ibid., 200–203.

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48.  Ibid., 207. 49.  Ibid., 210. 50.  Ibid., 211. 51.  Ibid., 216. 52.  Ibid., 218. 53.  See also Philip Clayton and Wm. Andrew Schwartz, What Is Ecological Civilization? Crisis, Hope and the Future of the Planet (Anoka, MN: Process Century Press, 2019), 147–64. The authors work out a response to the current environmental crisis in terms of what they call a nonhierarchically ordered network of individuals and organizations. In my judgment, this corresponds to what Rolston would term an ecosystem, namely, as a network of hierarchically ordered systems. 54.  See Holmes Rolston, III, “Surprisingly Neuroplastic Human Brains: Reading, Science, Philosophy, Theology,” Theology and Science 17, no. 3 (August 2019): 395–402. Rolston calls attention to the way that the human brain adjusts to an ever-changing physical and cultural environment through pattern recognition of what has worked in the past within one context and adjusting it to a new context and a new way of dealing with external reality.

Chapter Seven

Divine and Human Personhood in a Systems-Oriented Approach to Reality

In this chapter, I address the Christian doctrine of the Trinity from a purely philosophical and in explicitly theological context. That is, in line with the overall project of this book, I provide a process- or systems-oriented understanding of that foundational Christian belief which should be of value for both Christians and non-Christians alike, even if for different reasons. For, as I see it, the basic philosophical issue which underlies the various historical positions on the doctrine over the centuries has been the age-old problem of the One and the Many. Depending upon one’s antecedent philosophical understanding of the proper relation between the One and the Many, one’s theological position on the doctrine of the Trinity will be different from that of those who consciously or unconsciously choose another philosophical paradigm for the relation between the One and the Many. Likewise, depending upon one’s antecedent understanding of that same relation between the One and the Many, one’s predisposition to the phenomenon of “emergence,” above all in the life sciences, will be different. That is, for those scientists and philosophers who are fully committed to a reductionist understanding of physical reality (the whole is nothing more than the sum of its parts) the notion of the emergence of ontologically new and different structures of reality within a hierarchically ordered universe is simply wrong-headed. For other scientists and philosophers committed to a more holistic understanding of physical reality (the whole is more than and other than the sum of its parts), emergence seems to be necessarily part of the evolutionary process. Finally, does the term “person” have the same meaning and value over time or is it an ever-changing reality—that is, a de facto set of body-mind processes that continue to evolve in meaning and value? Seemingly we human beings are both. But how are these two different perspectives on the meaning of human 101

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personhood to be understood in resolving controversial issues, above all, issues in the ethics of health care? In line with the thinking of Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead earlier in this book, I believe that both the One and the Many are ongoing activities or processes which result from moment to moment in an entity or determinate reality. Just as a Whiteheadian actual entity is both an everchanging subject of experience and a de facto material reality (“superject”),1 so the relationship between the One and the Many is always evolving and yet with determinate states of being for both the One and the Many along the way. That is, the One is invariably a corporate entity, the moment-bymoment result of a process or set of processes. The Many, on the contrary, are the individual components of that process or set of processes. Many individual entities become one corporate reality over and over again, whether that process is the reality of an atom or the reality of an entire universe or ecosystem. In Whitehead’s view, every actual entity is a combination of mental and physical prehensions, both negative and positive prehensions.2 I would further argue that the principle of novelty or creativity (i.e., the many becoming one over and over again), not only applies to the self-constitution of an actual entity but should likewise apply to “societies” or “systems,” corporate realities that are more than simply the sum of their component parts or members. Thus, while an individual actual entity is an ongoing unity of parts or members, a society or system is in a much stronger sense a corporate reality—that is, a One emergent out of the dynamic interrelation of its many subsocieties and their constituent actual entities at any given moment. Moreover, this particular understanding of “society” or system” resolves a long-term paradox in the philosophical understanding of the Trinity, namely, the claim that God is for Christians both one entity and three entities at the same time. That is, while one can combine lower-order activities into a higher-order activity, one cannot combine the lower-order components of inanimate things into a higher-order corporate reality without undermining the mode of operation of those lower-order components. As Ivor Leclerc comments, the substantial form of the higher-order reality integrates the substantial form of its constituent parts or members into its own higher-order mode of operation. Only if the higher-order entity breaks up for some reason, do the substantial forms of the component parts or members recover their own mode of operation.3 The proper relation between parts and wholes in dealing with the doctrine of the Trinity has always been ambiguous. For example, if one focuses on the unity of the divine being and tries to explain how God is also three persons, one is tempted to modalism (one God in three different ways to present Godself). If, however, one’s primary focus is on the role played by the three divine persons, one is tempted to tritheism (belief in three separate gods who



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freely choose to work closely with one another). Medieval theologians in the Western Church, following the lead of Augustine and Aquinas, implicitly gave ontological priority to the One over the Many.4 God is one intelligent being but with three interrelated mental functions (memory, understanding, and will) which analogously correspond to Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Eastern theologians, however, implicitly gave priority to the Many and found the oneness of God in the indissoluble community of life of the divine persons with one another.5 An even easier way to explain Christian belief in one God and three divine persons, however, would be to think of the divine persons in terms of interrelated activities rather than as co-equal entities. For example, the activities proper to each divine person could then be integrated into the higher-order activity of the Trinity as a corporate reality in its own right, namely, a transcendent interpersonal community. They all create, redeem, and sanctify both the human race and in some measure the rest of creation. Yet, because it is so hard for us human beings to think in this fashion, we “appropriate” different roles to different persons.6 The Father creates, the Son redeems, the Spirit sanctifies. But all these separate activities should be in the end only a single activity, the activity of being God in multiple ways vis-à-vis the world of creation. Here one may object that only the Son, the Divine Word, became incarnate as Jesus of Nazareth, not the Father or the Spirit. But how did the Son become incarnate, if not through the conjoint activity and participation of the Father and the Spirit in bringing it about (e.g., Luke 1:26–38)? Likewise, in his Last Supper discourse to the Apostles, Jesus stresses his unity with the Father in bringing about the Kingdom of God on earth (John 17:21). There is, of course, a movement in contemporary systematic theology away from the traditional emphasis on Logos-Christology to explain the God-world relationship in terms of a new emphasis on Spirit-Christology.7 But unless this new approach to systematic theology is carefully qualified, Spirit-Christology will be no more adequate to explain the doctrine of the Trinity than its historical predecessor, Logos-Christology. In other words, the activity of the Trinity vis-à-vis the world of creation is always triune because, from a philosophical perspective, they could not otherwise be a unitary reality, namely, a transcendent interpersonal community. In the Summa theologiae, Aquinas seems to have had something like this in mind when he describes the divine persons as subsistent relations.8 But because he was unconsciously thinking in the language of interrelated entities rather than of closely integrated activities, he used a noun (“subsistent relations”) rather than a verb or participle (e.g., a dynamic set of activities) to solve the traditional problem of the One and the Many: how three individual entities are simultaneously still only one transcendent corporate entity. Yet, in fairness to Aquinas, such a shift in terminology would have meant leaving the

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world of individual entities behind and moving into an unpredictable world of dynamically interrelated activities or processes.9 But then what does it mean to be a human being? Is a human being an integrated set of bodily and mental activities? Or is a human being an individual entity with a given historical identity or “personality”? In Process and Reality Whitehead uses the term “structured society” to describe a set of actual entities that for the moment have the same “defining characteristic” or “common element of form.”10 A structured society, however, only becomes a “personally ordered society” when it retains over an extended period the same historical identity—that is, one and the same governing structure or defining characteristic. Yet many of the actual entities constitutive of the various societies/processes making up the human body do not have consciousness. But these nonliving actual entities insofar as they share a defining characteristic or common element of form should then be further classified as “corpuscular societies.”11 That is, they appear to be material entities (e.g., atoms and molecules, the minor components of the allegedly inanimate “things” of this world). Whitehead, however, also uses the term “structured society” to describe the overall soul-body relation within a human being or any other animal species.12 But on this point Whitehead differs from Thomas Aquinas and others in the scholastic tradition. For them, the soul is regnant over the body because it imposes its agenda on the way that the body functions. For Whitehead, however, the “soul” or regnant subsociety within the overall bodysoul combination does not control the activities proper to the body but only influences their relatively independent mode of operation through a form of reciprocal causality, with body and soul together giving and receiving information to one another.13 For example, a fertilized ovum is both a historical reality and an organism still in process of development. Every human being, for example, has a natural set of genes that will heavily condition (though not totally control) its development first in the womb of the mother, then as an infant, a child, an adult human being, and finally a human being near death. But those different stages of rapid physical development in youth and then of gradual decline later in life likewise affect what is already the case and what can be expected to happen in the days, months, years ahead. Accordingly, both the morality and the legality of beginning-of-life and end-of-life issues are more difficult to assess within a Whiteheadian context. Yet this multifaceted Whiteheadian approach to human personhood might also provide unexpected common ground for those engaged in serious debate about major social issues For, in the sometimes sharp exchanges between those representing different viewpoints on these important issues, there is often no attention paid to the common good, the presumed needs and aspirations of the civil society in which all the disputing parties coexist. The problem, of course, is in defining



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the common good under such circumstances. Is it, as John Locke maintained in his Second Treatise on Civil Government, simply the will of the majority over against the manifest resistance of minority groups?14 Or is it instead a consensus position based on a carefully worked out compromise, as Jean Jacques Rousseau proposed in his book The Social Contract with the notion of the general will [volonté générale]?15 Clearly, to preserve the good order and long-lasting harmony of civil society, it should be Rousseau’s volonté générale rather than simply Locke’s will of the majority. The latter may de facto determine what they see as the common good of the civil society at any given moment. Yet the former is clearly the better choice, however difficult to achieve in actual practice. Would appeal to the doctrine of the Trinity have any relevance here in determining the true common good (volonté générale)? Unfortunately, there are also multiple views on how to explain the doctrine of the Trinity that have emerged in the last century. These different views are nicely summarized in Ted Peters’s book God as Trinity: Relationality and Temporality in Divine Life.16 Peters begins by taking note of Karl Barth’s programmatic statement in Church Dogmatics: God is the Revealer (God the Father), the One Revealed (God the Son), and the act of revealing (God the Holy Spirit), all at the same time. God is thus one God in three modes of being: “in the mode of the Father, in the mode of the Son, and in the mode of the Holy Ghost”17 Welch, following the lead of Barth, claims that the doctrine of the Trinity is Christ-centered and revelation-grounded. It cannot be justified by way of the Hegelian metaphysics of Absolute Spirit nor by way of proof-texts from Sacred Scripture in Protestant fundamentalism or through the teaching authority of the Church in Roman Catholicism.18 Revelation is to be found in the act of revealing, not in written propositions. There is a threefoldness in the structure or pattern of the one act of God in Christ and therefore in the structure of all divine activity or the transcendent Being of God. Likewise, the direct experience of revelation in reading Scripture and through participation in Church life by the believer is more important rather than the explanation of its rational possibility for that Christian. With Barth, Peters also believes that if “the word of God in revelation is not just a word about God but rather is God in the Godself, then we find God on both sides of the revelatory equation. God is also on both sides of the eternity-time equation.”19 He quotes Barth to the same effect: “Without ceasing to be God, He has made Himself a worldly, human, temporal God in relation to this work of His.”20 Somewhat the same process-oriented mode of thought is to be found in Peters’s analysis of the principle of correspondence in Eberhard Jungel’s book The Doctrine of the Trinity: God’s Being Is in Becoming.21 According to Jüngel, there exists a correspondence between the inner life of God and God’s external relationship to creation: Jesus Christ is that man in whom God has defined himself as a human God.22 That is, “the way in which God

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is related to the world cannot be different from the way in which God is self-related.”23 But God is self-related in and through the perichoresis of the three divine persons vis-à-vis one another to be together one God. Through this reciprocal participation, the three modes of being [the divine persons] become concretely united. In this concrete unity they are God.24 This means, however, that the unity of God is not a simple unity but a differentiated unity, equivalently “an eternal process of becoming unified, a ‘becoming one.’”25 But there is an underlying ambiguity here. Is this differentiated unity grounded in the Godhead or nature of God, or is it grounded in the perichoresis of the three divine persons vis-à-vis one another? As noted earlier, to affirm the first is to risk the charge of modalism, God as one divine person with three modes of being (seinsweisen), Barth’s own position in the Church Dogmatics.26 To affirm the unity of God in the perichoresis of the divine persons, however, is to risk the charge of tritheism (three gods in close relationship), a position consciously resisted by Barth. Furthermore, if God in Godself is one person, and if God concerning the world is three persons, then Jüngel’s proposed correspondence between the immanent Trinity (God apart from the world) and the economic Trinity (God involved with the world) can no longer be sustained. Peters comments: “Why not just go all the way and affirm a God whose personhood is itself being constituted through God’s ongoing relation to the creation?”27 Likewise, after noting that Jüngel in a later book, God as the Mystery of the World, “gives unqualified agreement to what is known as Rahner’s Rule: the economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity and the immanent Trinity is the economic Trinity.” Peters concludes: “What this implies is that the relationality God experiences through Christ’s saving relationship to the world is constitutive of trinitarian relations proper. God’s relations ad extra become God’s relations ad intra.”28 As we shall see next, there is considerable controversy over what Rahner really meant here by affirming the identity of the immanent and economic Trinity.29 In the same context, Rahner also says: “God relates to us in a threefold manner, and this threefold, free and gratuitous relation to us is not merely a copy or an analogy of the inner Trinity, but this Trinity itself, albeit as freely and gratuitously communicated.”30 Yet what is “freely and gratuitously communicated” presupposes that “the three divine persons have an interrelated existence proper to themselves apart from their relation to us their creatures. But once they freely choose to create and redeem us, they are present to us really as themselves and not in virtue of some finite copy or analogy of their inner divine life.”31 Peters cites other well-known authors on the Trinity on behalf of his position here. But it is interesting that Peters makes no reference in this historical overview of twentieth-century theology of the Trinity to Thomas F. Torrance who was one of the editors of Barth’s Church Dogmatics and himself the author of many books on the doctrine of the Trinity. Torrance, of



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course, favors the traditional understanding of the Incarnation: “God in His transcendent freedom made the universe out of nothing [and gave it] a reality distinct from His own but dependent on it”; “the Son of God has become man without ceasing to be the God He ever was.” In his comments on Karl Rahner’s theology of the Trinity, Peters summarizes Rahner’s position as follows: “it is God as one or another of the divine persons who relates to the world; it is not God as the unity of the divine being. The way we experience God is through God’s saving activity within history—through the economy of salvation—and here we know God as the redeeming word in Christ and as uniting love in the Spirit.”32 In terms of my own systems approach to the Trinity, however, we actually experience all three persons at the same time in every prayerful moment but that we focus on just one of the divine persons in this experience because we are accustomed to think in terms of individual entities one by one rather than in terms of their conjoint activity in our regard. In fairness to Peters, however, Rahner seems to say exactly what Peters attributes to him. “Jesus is not simply God in general, but the Son. The second divine person, God’s Logos, is man, and only he is man. Hence there is at least one ‘mission,’ one presence in the world, one reality of salvation history which is not merely appropriated to some divine person, but which is proper to him. . . . Here something occurs ‘outside’ the intra-divine life in the world itself, something which is not a mere effect of the efficient causality of the triune God, but something which belongs to the Logos alone, which is the history of one divine person, in contrast to the other divine persons.”33 At the same time, Rahner warns against the heresy of tritheism in talking about the three divine persons in this way unless one substitutes “distinct manner of subsisting” for the conventional understanding of person.34 “Distinct manner of subsisting” is better than “mode of being” for Barth because it is closer to Aquinas’s description of the divine persons as subsistent relations.35 But, if the one God subsists in three distinct manners of subsisting, then “there is only one real consciousness in God, which is shared by Father, Son, and Spirit, by each in his own proper way.”36 Behind Rahner’s thinking here is evidently a desire to remove the classical doctrine of the Trinity from the realm of speculative theology and to present it to the faithful in a more pastorally appealing way. For, when we pray to the triune God, we normally pray to one of the divine persons, not to God in general. But he also recognized the danger of unconscious tritheism, belief in three gods, in this pastoral practice. God is one God, not three gods, in the creeds of the Church. Hence, he urged a change in the conventional understanding of person as applied to God so that each divine person is a “distinct manner of subsisting” in the one divine being (the one divine consciousness). My position, on the contrary, is that we should rather rethink what is meant by nature or essence, both in general and concerning

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the divine nature. In a process- or systems-oriented metaphysics such as I propose in this book, nature or essence is an activity collectively exercised by closely interrelated subjects of experience. The entitative unity thus achieved is that of an objective system, an interpersonal system, or community. In this way. the way each one contributes to the corporate activity constitutive of them all as an organized system/community. Each person achieves his/ her individual identity in contributing something different to their corporate existence as an ongoing community. There is likewise no danger of tritheism here since tritheism logically presupposes three individual divine persons who here and now work together but who are persons in their own right quite apart from their relations to one another. Within a systems-oriented approach to the doctrine of the Trinity, however, the divine persons have no separate identity or existence apart from the other two persons. Where I wholeheartedly agree with Rahner’s understanding of the Trinity is in his claim that the immanent Trinity is ontologically different from the economic Trinity, not vice versa. The immanent Trinity, in other words, is the cause or ontological source of the economic Trinity, namely, the Trinity as operative in Salvation History. Our Christian experience of the economic Trinity as three different divine persons at work in our lives does not determine the inner reality of the triune God apart from our experience. So, contrary to Peters’s view that “the eternal or immanent Trinity finds its very identity in the economy of temporal salvation events.”37 Rahner and I would both agree that the basic identity of the eternal or immanent Trinity is what it is quite apart from the way we experience it or think about it at this point in Salvation History. Likewise, while the economic Trinity has significantly affected the relations of the divine persons to one another within the immanent Trinity, yet their relations to one another within Salvation History are not constitutive but only reflective of who they already are vis-à-vis one another.38 Rahner, admittedly, had to work harder to establish this same understanding of the relation between the immanent and economic Trinity because of his prior commitment to classical metaphysics with its focus on individual entities as constitutive of reality. For me, it is easier to maintain this nuanced distinction between the immanent Trinity and the economic Trinity because of my focus on processes or systems rather than individual entities as the constituents in a world made up of interrelated and interlocking systems. Following his review and critique of Rahner’s thinking on the Trinity, Peters turns his attention to Jürgen Moltmann. He applauds Moltmann’s decision to abandon Barth’s and Rahner’s somewhat modalistic understanding of the divine persons as distinct modes of being or distinct manners of subsisting within one and the same divine consciousness and instead claim that “when it comes to divine action, we have three subjects, or loci, of activity, not one.”39 The unity of these three subjectivities or centers of activity within the Trinity is to be found “in the perichoresis of the divine persons.”40 There



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is a legitimate distinction between the economic and the immanent Trinity in the sense that the immanent Trinity is the object of worship and focus of praise in the Christian liturgy and the economic Trinity is the subject of attention in the preaching of the Gospel message. But, as Peters sees it, “for Moltmann there finally can be only one Trinity, the economic Trinity.”41 Furthermore, as Peters sees it, if the three divine persons are the constituents of a divine community, then they define one another with the consequence that “each one must be finite.” Peters concludes that Moltmann’s social doctrine of the Trinity is as a result an instance of nominalism, a difference between the divine persons in terms of names, not ontological identities. In my judgment, Peters has made a valid point here. But in his emphasis on the different activities of the divine persons within the economic Trinity, has he evaded the finitude of the divine persons vis-à-vis one another? I would say, no, since he like Moltmann still treats the divine persons as individual entities rather than as coordinated individual processes within the corporate process or system proper to the divine life. For, while processes can be readily integrated with one another to co-constitute a more comprehensive process, this cannot be done with individual entities. They can be loosely integrated into a higher-order socially organized entity like a human community or, in the world of nature, an environment. But in the end they remain themselves as individual entities even when thus joined together. As a consequence they limit and define (render finite) one another as co-participants in a finite or limited community or environment. Processes or systems, on the contrary, provided that they are not purely mechanical in their operation but instead open-ended or evolving are, regardless of size or complexity, infinite. They are, to be sure, potentially infinite, not actually infinite, since at any given moment in the process they are each something definite, albeit something that will sooner or later change, become something else. Aquinas and other classical metaphysicians, for example, conceived God as Pure Act with no potentiality to be anything other than what He is right now.42 But from a process- or systems-oriented perspective, that means that God is “dead,” no longer alive; nothing is happening. God as Pure Act has no future, no potentiality to change and develop in response to changing circumstances. What is seen as perfection within classical metaphysics is instead a liability within a systems- or process-oriented approach to reality. I turn now to Peters’s review and critique of Leonardo Boff’s understanding of the Trinity which like that of Moltmann is a social or communitarian model of God. Peters claims that, even with this communitarian model, Boff still maintains the traditional logical (though not temporal) priority of the Father to the Son and Holy Spirit.43 But, while Peters interprets this inequality among the divine persons to be an implicit reaffirmation of the primacy of the immanent Trinity over the economic Trinity, I instead believe that it

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is due to Boff’s interpretation of the divine persons as individual entities with one another rather than as interrelated processes that are simultaneously co-constituting the corporate unity of the divine community (itself an ever-changing reality). Unilateral causation, in other words, namely, the ontological priority of the cause to its effect, was simply assumed by classical metaphysics on the assumption that the world is populated by individual entities (substances) which first exist in their own right and then have various kinds of contingent relations to one another. Within a process- or systemsoriented approach to reality, however, which emphasizes that parts (e.g., Whiteheadian actual entities) are dynamically interrelated to one another in their ongoing co-constitution of the whole (e.g., a Whiteheadian society) simultaneous mutual causation is normally at work.44 Peters then dismisses all forms of process theology as monotheistic in its presuppositions even when attempts are made to give a Trinitarian interpretation of Whitehead’s God.45 Included in his judgment here is his analysis and critique of my previous attempts at such a project.46 He summarizes my position as follows: “God as Trinity can be conceived of as three personally ordered societies whose unity as one God is itself the unity of a democratically organized structured society. God is a society of societies. The unity of God is a corporate unity of unities”47 He then concludes: “Bracken’s social Trinity risks tritheism.”48 Basically, Peters is correct in his analysis here. My earlier attempts at a Trinitarian understanding of Whitehead’s God did not make clear what I have emphasized in this chapter, namely, that the divine persons are not individual entities with process-oriented relations to one another, but ongoing processes which at every moment are united in their relation to one another. This subtle shift of emphasis from divine persons as primarily individual entities to divine persons as primarily ongoing person-constituting processes is crucial for avoiding the charge of tritheism for a social or communitarian model of the Trinity such as I have consistently maintained over the years. Individual entities remain distinct from one another even when they are dynamically interrelated; only lower-order processes (e.g., the process proper to each of the divine persons) can become integral parts of a still higher-order process (e.g., the communitarian life of God) without sacrificing their identity as lower-order processes in their own right at the same time. As for the other process theologians mentioned in Peters’s overview (i.e., Lewis Ford, Marjorie Suchocki, John Cobb, and David Griffin), I have to agree with Peters that their efforts at a Trinitarian interpretation of Whitehead’s God ultimately fall short. They each end up with different forms of Trinitarian modalism because Whitehead himself was a philosopher, not a theologian. As I found out by trial and error, only a significant revision of Whitehead’s category of society (i.e., giving societies an objective reality other than and different from the reality of their constitutive actual entities at



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any given moment) will allow one to use his metaphysical scheme as philosophical underpinning for a Trinitarian theology that is neither modalistic nor tritheistic but genuinely triune. Next on the list of Trinitarian theologians in Peters’s overview is Catherine LaCugna who, to the best of my knowledge, coined the phrase “Rahner’s Rule.” As Peters accurately notes, she thus significantly moved beyond what Rahner himself had in mind with the claim that the immanent Trinity is the economic Trinity and vice versa. Whereas Rahner still preserved the ontological difference between the immanent and the economic Trinity, LaCugna “dispenses with the distinction between God’s life ad intra and ad extra. There is but one Trinitarian life of God, and it spans and incorporates the entire scope of temporal history.”49 Peters wholeheartedly endorses LaCugna’s understanding of Rahner’s Rule, but I just as firmly do not. There must be a real difference between the immanent Trinity and the economic Trinity. The immanent Trinity must be the ontological cause or source of the economic Trinity. It is not enough to appeal to the mystery of theologia as explanation for the immanent Trinity. God, in other words, cannot be “for us” (see the title of LaCugna’s book) without being antecedently “for itself,” a divine reality distinct from human beings and the rest of creation. For example, even you and I need a personal identity to give ourselves generously to others. But, these critical remarks aside, LaCugna’s book has had an enormous influence on Trinitarian theology to the present moment because of the way it drew attention to the pastoral significance of an otherwise purely speculative belief about God. Peters next critiques Robert Jensen for following the lead of Barth in claiming “There is one event, God, with three identities [as Father, Son and Holy Spirit].”50 But Jensen goes beyond Barth in saying that God is thus not an entity but an event that happens three times. This is very similar to my process-oriented understanding of the Trinity except that Jensen and Peters in the end submerge the immanent Trinity into the economic Trinity. That is, for them the existence of the immanent Trinity is dependent on the eschatological fulfillment of the economic Trinity, the Trinity at work in Salvation History. “Jensen frequently speaks of the Father as the given, the Son as present possibility, and the Spirit as the eschatological outcome [of the economic Trinity as an ongoing cosmic process].”51 What is at stake here for both Jensen and Peters is an attempt to reject belief in God as a timeless entity existing apart from the temporal process of this world (the immanent Trinity) in favor of a future-oriented and thus time-bound God within the cosmic process (the economic Trinity): “This economic Trinity is eschatologically God himself, an immanent Trinity”52 While I applaud their efforts to substitute a process-oriented understanding of the Trinity for the relatively static classical understanding of the Trinity, I have serious reservations about

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some of their philosophical presuppositions about the relation between time and eternity. First, they should realize that the focus on the priority of the future over the past and the present is an inevitable consequence of thinking in purely time-bound categories. On the contrary, I believe that the future is for God already real, but no more real than the present and the past. That is, if eternity is the proper frame of reference for thinking about the ongoing process of the divine life is, then past, present, and future simultaneously co-exist for God. They are not fixed or static realities for God, but dynamically interrelated dimensions of one and the same ongoing process of the divine life.53 Here I refer to Robert Neville’s book Eternity and Time’s Flow where he emphasizes the dynamic interrelatedness of past, present, and future within human consciousness (and in my view, likewise within the shared consciousness of the divine persons as far as we can understand it): “Not only is something new always happening—the present is steadily moving on to new dates—but the past is always growing and the structure of future possibilities is constantly shifting in response to the decisions made in each moment of present actualization.” Thus, unlike classical theories of divine predestination, within this understanding of eternity God does not see the future as an already existing set of events predetermined by the divine will, but as an ever-changing set of possibilities for events that could happen because of the free decisions of human beings and the spontaneity in the activities of nonhuman creatures here and now in the present. God is thus active in this cosmic process not to alter events that God already knows will happen, but to introduce new possibilities for something good to still happen as an indirect and unintended consequence of a bad decision by the creature.54 For example, the enduring reality of what is good within the cosmic process should be weighed against the transient character of what is thought to be here and now evil: The revolts of destructive evil, purely self-regarding, are dismissed into their triviality of merely individual facts; and yet the good they did achieve in individual joy, in individual sorrow, in the introduction of needed contrast, is yet saved by its relation to the completed whole. The image—and it is but an image—the image under which this operative growth of God’s nature is best conceived, is that of a tender care that nothing be lost.55

The last theologian covered in Peters’s overview of twentieth-century Trinitarian theology is arguably one of the most important theologians of the twentieth century, Wolfhart Pannenberg. Peters sees Pannenberg as also progressing beyond Karl Rahner in his understanding of the relation between the immanent and the economic Trinity: “the eternal self-identity of God cannot be conceived independently of the work of the Son and the Spirit within salvation history.”56 I would rather say that the full self-identity rather than the eternal self-identity of God cannot be conceived apart from



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the work of the Son and the Spirit in Salvation History. For Pannenberg, as I see it, the Trinity has an eternal self-identity apart from the world, an identity that is confirmed and amplified by the events in the creation, redemption, and sanctification of human beings and the rest of the creation. The cosmic process has made a difference to the reality of God but this difference is not constitutive of the very identity of the divine persons to one another.57 Peters, however, is of another mindset: “The existence of God as Trinity depends upon the future of God’s coming kingdom; and the coming of the kingdom depends upon the person of Jesus—in the form of the anticipation of it future and as revealing the love of God.”58 Much of Peters’s interpretation of Pannenberg’s Trinitarian theology here is based upon a statement in volume 1 of his Systematic Theology: The rule or kingdom of the Father is not so external to his deity that he might be God without his kingdom. The world as the object of his lordship might not be necessary to his deity, since its existence owes its origin to his creative freedom, but the existence of a world is not compatible with his deity apart from his lordship over it. Hence lordship goes hand in hand with the deity of God.59

The existence of the triune God and the existence of the world are thus mutually interdependent, says Peters. I concede that Pannenberg is somewhat ambiguous in the previoulsly cited passage. But much of the ambiguity disappears if one reads the very next sentence which Peters fails to quote: “It [the lordship of the Father over creation] has its place already in the intratrinitarian life of God, in the reciprocity of the relation between the Son, who freely subjects himself to the lordship of the Father, and the Father, who hands over his lordship to the Son.”60 There is, in other words, already within the eternal life of the immanent Trinity a mutual handing-over of lordship between the Father and the Son. Hence, all that the passage really says is that the created world necessarily finds its place within relationships between the Father and the Son that have existed from all eternity. Otherwise, the created world could not fit into the already existing pattern of existence and activity between the divine persons. So Pannenberg’s Trinitarian theology should not be used as support for Peters’s thesis that the immanent Trinity is the eschatological fulfillment of the economic Trinity. For Pannenberg, the latter is only the time-bound manifestation of what has been true from the very beginning of the cosmic process, indeed from all eternity within the divine life. Peters says as much elsewhere in his interpretation of Pannenberg’s Trinitarian theology: “This [the Godhead of God as the world’s creator] does not require Pannenberg to uphold the idea of a divine becoming in history, as though the trinitarian God were the result of a developmental process. Rather, the eschatological event determines what will have been eternally true.”61

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Peters also mentions in an endnote that the Holy Spirit is for Pannenberg “Spirit-love,” the activity that binds the divine persons to one another to be one God. He then adds: “Pannenberg likens Spirit-love to that of a dynamic force-field in physics with the Father and Son as singular concretions of the Spirit’s reality.”62 Actually, what Pannenberg says in the passage from his Systematic Theology is as follows: The two statements “God is Spirit” and “God is love” denote the same unity of essence by which Father, Son, and Spirit are united in the fellowship of the one God. . . . The Spirit is the power of love that lets the others be. This power can thus give existence to creaturely life because it is already at work in the reciprocity of the trinitarian life of God as in eternity each of the divine persons lets the others be what they are.”63

So Pannenberg is really saying that Spirit is both an activity and an entity—that is, the power of love that binds the divine persons to one another within the immanent Trinity and gives existence to creaturely life within the economic Trinity. Moreover, Spirit as activity rather than entity is akin to a dynamic forcefield within physics which serves as a foundation for the Godworld relationship. All this is very similar to my understanding of the Trinity and the Godworld relationship from a systems- or process-oriented perspective: namely, that the divine persons are in the first place lower-order processes or systems which together constitute the higher-order process or system of the divine life. This higher-order process of the divine life takes place within the equivalent of a physical forcefield as the energy source for the ongoing dynamic interrelationship of the divine persons to one another within the divine life. Hence, my only difference from Pannenberg in explaining the doctrine of the Trinity is that I am more thorough-going than he is in offering a new process-ordered understanding of the doctrine as a solution to the paradox of three individual entities somehow becoming one corporate entity without losing their concomitant ontological identity as individual entities. Likewise, learning from the criticism Pannenberg received from scientists on his (mis)use of the notion of field,64 I emphasize that the forcefield proper to the divine persons is an analogous concept which needs to be further specified when employed in different contexts. “Field,” in other words, is akin to “substance” in classical metaphysics, that which is presupposed as the First Category of Being. In reviewing this chapter, I first claimed that the tension between the “traps” of modalism and tritheism in classical Trinitarian theology can be eliminated by conceiving the divine persons as inter-related lower-order processes that co-constitute a single higher-order process that is constitutive of their life together as a divine community. Where individual entities in a community remain sufficiently separate from one another that one is



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tempted to say that the community is nothing more than the sum of its parts or members, individual processes or systems that combine to constitute a more complex process or system co-constitute a new higher-order reality distinct from themselves as parts or members. In this case, the whole is more than and other than its parts or members. Then in the second part of the chapter, I reviewed and critiqued models of the Trinity offered by various prominent Trinitarian theologians of the twentieth century in Ted Peters’s book God as Trinity along with Peters’s analysis and critique of their work. Here, as I see it, the classical tension between modalism and tritheism is given a new focus. Those who see the immanent Trinity as ontologically before the economic Trinity tend to be somewhat modalistic in their thinking about the Trinity, given that they adhere closely to the classical explanation of the doctrine in scholastic metaphysics. Those who are in favor of closer integration of the immanent Trinity and economic Trinity, even in some cases a virtual identity of the two at the end of the cosmic process, tend to be tritheists, given the way that the three divine persons are regularly seen as quite separate “personalities” in Salvation History. Here too I recommend by way of a suitable compromise-position a process- or systems-oriented understanding of the divine persons and their conjoint reality as still only one God or transcendent interpersonal community. As I see it, the notion of process or system supersedes the rival notion of substance and accident as the appropriate conceptual vehicle for an explanation of the God-world relationship. But a process or system is not monistic but multidimensional in its mode of operation. Properly understood, a process or system is invariably a unity-in-diversity of parts or members, a patterned set of interrelated events. In this regard, the Christian doctrine of the Trinity can be seen not only as an article of faith for Christians. From another perspective, it is also a stellar example of a relatively new philosophical paradigm for the complex relation between the One and the Many at various levels of existence and activity within the natural and social sciences. NOTES 1. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 27–28. 2.  Ibid., 22–23, 41. 3.  Ivor Leclerc, The Philosophy of Nature (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1986), 107–29. 4.  Colin E. Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many: God, Creation and the Culture of Modernity (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 16–21. 5.  Ibid., 163–66. 6.  Aquinatis Thomae, Summa theologiae, 4 vols. (Madrid: Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, 1951), I, Q. 29, art. 4; Q. 39, a. 7; Q.41, a. 1. 7. Joseph A. Bracken, “Trinitarian Spirit Christology: In Need of a New Metaphysics?” Theological Studies 72 (2011): 750–67. 8.  Aquinatis Thomae, Summa theologiae, I, Q. 29, art. 4.

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 9. Gunton, The One, the Three and the Many, 173–79. 10. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 34; Aquinas 1951: I, Q. 29, a. 4. 11. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 35. 12.  Ibid., 99. 13.  Ibid., 108–9. 14.  John Locke, “An Essay Concerning the True Original, Extent and End of Civil Government,” in The English Philosophers from Bacon to Mill, Edwin Burtt, ed. (New York: Modern Library, 1939). 15. Jean Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses (London: Everyman’s Library, 1923), Bk. 23, chap. 8. 16.  Ted Peters, God as Trinity: Relationality and Temporality in Divine Life (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 1993). 17.  Ibid., 81–90; Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics, vol. 1, part 1. Edited by G. W. Bromley and T. F. Torrance and translated by G. W. Bromley (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1975): I/1, 359. 18. Peters, God as Trinity, 84. 19.  Ibid., 90. 20. Barth, Church Dogmatics, III/2, 457. 21. Peters, God as Trinity, 90–96; Eberhard Jüngel, The Doctrine of the Trinity: God’s Being Is in Becoming (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. 1976). 22. Peters, God as Trinity, 84. 23.  Ibid., 93. 24.  Ibid., 95. 25.  Ibid., 92. 26.  Ibid., 94. 27.  Ibid., 95. 28.  Ibid., 96. 29.  Karl Rahner, The Trinity. Translated by Joseph Donceel (New York: Herder and Herder, 1970), 22. 30.  Ibid., 35. 31. Joseph A. Bracken, God: Three Who Are One (Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, 2008), 47. 32 Thomas F. Torrance, Space, Time and Incarnation (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), 59. 32. Peters, God as Trinity, 96. 33. Rahner, The Trinity, 23. 34.  Ibid., 109–10. 35.  Ibid., 110; see also Aquinas, Summa theologiae; I, Q. 29, a. 4. 36.  Ibid., 107. 37.  Ibid., 97. 38. Wolfhart Pannenberg, Systematic Theology. Translated by Geoffrey Bromiley (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1988), I:328–29. 39. Peters, God as Trinity, 104. 40.  Ibid., 104; see also Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God. Translated by Margaret Kohl (San Francisco, CA: Harper & Row, 1981), 150. 41.  Ibid., 107. 42.  Aquinatis, Summa theologiae: I, Q. 3, art. 4. 43. Peters, God as Trinity, 113; see also Leonardo Boff, Trinity and Society. Translated by Paul Burns (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis. Books, 1988), 71. 44. Gernot Falkner and Renate Falkner, “On the Incompatibility of the Neo-Darwinian Hypothesis with Systems-Theoretical Explanations of Biological Development,” in Beyond Mechanism: Putting Life Back into Biology, Brian G. Henning and Adam C. Scarfe, eds. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2013), 93–114. 45. Peters, God as Trinity, 114–22. 46.  Ibid., 117–20. 47. Ibid., 118; see also Joseph Bracken “Process Philosophy and Trinitarian Theology,” Process Studies 8 (1978), 217–30; Bracken, “Process Philosophy and Trinitarian Theology-II,” Process Studies 11(1981): 83–96. 48. Peters, God as Trinity, 121.



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49.  Ibid., 125. See also Catherine Mowry LaCugna, God for Us: The Trinity and Christian Life (HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), 221–24. 50. Peters, God as Trinity, 128. See also Robert W. Jensen, The Triune Identity (Philadelphia, PA: Fortress Press, 1982), 136–38, 179–80. 51. Peters, God as Trinity, 130. 52.  Ibid., 134. 53.  Christianity and Process Thought: Spirituality for a Changing World (Philadelphia, PA: Templeton Foundation Press, 2006), 78–79. 54 Robert Cummings Neville, Eternity and Time’s Flow (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 109–20. 54. Bracken, Christianity and Process Thought, 82–85. 55. Whitehead, Process and Reality, 346. 56. Peters, God as Trinity, 135. 57. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, I:327–36. 58. Peters, God as Trinity, 128. 59. Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, 1:313. 60. Peters, God as Trinity, 137–38. 61.  Ibid., 140–41. 62.  Ibid., 226n. 131. 63.  63 Pannenberg, Systematic Theology, 427. 64.  John Polkinghorne, Belief in God in an Age of Science (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 82.

Chapter Eight

Linking Science and Religion within a New Worldview

As noted earlier in chapter 2, Whitehead in his chapter on science and religion in Science and Religion proposed that “the two strongest general forces (apart from the mere impulse of the various senses)” which influence human behavior are “the force of our religious intuitions, and the force of our impulse to accurate observation and logical deduction.”1 All too often, however, these two drives in human nature seem to be opposed to one another when human beings engage in serious discussion of issues bearing on the common good of the community. Each side accuses the other side of prejudice in deciding on a suitable course of action. But if and when religious feeling and rational reflection are suitably combined to bring about active participation by all interested parties in one and the same positive course of action, then the results are frequently quite dramatic. The most obvious example of what I have in mind here is the recent encyclical letter of Pope Francis, the spiritual leader of the Roman Catholic Church, on the current environmental crisis.2 He uses the language of contemporary systems theory that is increasingly employed in the natural sciences, above all, in the life sciences, as a tool for organizing and further analyzing empirical data. But he uses that systems-oriented approach to physical reality for religious purposes—that is, to motivate not only fellow Roman Catholics and Christians of other denominations but all morally upright human beings to take action on behalf of remedying the current environmental crisis. I offer here a brief overview of the six chapters of the encyclical letter along with my commentary on how Pope Francis could have further developed his argument by working within the context of a systemsoriented approach to physical reality and the God-world relationship that I just laid out in chapter 7. 119

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In the first chapter he notes that rapid change is characteristic of the way that modern technology and technology-driven scientific research work in contemporary society. Yet “the goals of this rapid and constant change are not necessarily geared to the common good or to integral and sustainable human development.”3 Instead, air pollution, a lack of safe drinking water, overly crowded cities with insufficient public transportation, above all, the growing disparity in income and resources between rich and poor have been the indirect consequence of human beings heedlessly plunging ahead with technological advances in various areas of contemporary life without reference to the real needs of most of the people thereby affected. At the same time, however, Pope Francis immediately adds that the church “has no reason to offer a definitive opinion. She knows that honest debate must be encouraged among experts, while respecting divergent views.”4 This is a highly commendable admission on the part of the Pope. So often in the past, Papal encyclicals and other church documents have been written and published without appropriate consultation with experts in the related natural and social sciences and as a result, they have been heftily criticized or at least ignored by those with vested interests in the area of human life under consideration. At the same time, the church does have its point of view based on Scripture and church documents, in particular the socially oriented encyclical letters of predecessors of Francis in the Papacy: John XXIII, Paul VI, John Paul II, and Benedict XVI.5 Furthermore, Francis agrees with Patriarch Bartholomew, head of the Greek Orthodox Church, that the environmental crisis is rooted in ethical and spiritual issues that cannot be resolved by improved technology.6 For example, the Creation story in the Book of Genesis teaches that “human life is grounded in three fundamental and closely intertwined relationships: with God, with our neighbor, and with the earth itself.”7 Hence, any claim to private ownership of property on the part of individual human beings along with their right to dispose of it as they wish violates this pact with God, other human beings, and the nonhuman world. Likewise, saying that human beings are privileged creatures, given that they are made in the image and likeness of God “should not make us overlook the fact that each creature has its own purpose.”8 None of God’s creatures is superfluous within the divine plan for creation. For the same reasons, making concerted efforts to save the environment does not imply neglecting the needs of the poor and underprivileged. “Peace, justice and the preservation of creation are three absolutely interconnected themes, which cannot be separated and treated individually, without once again falling into reductionism.”9 Francis is pointing here to one of the weaknesses of current scientific methodology in dealing with the world of nature. As Whitehead pointed out in Science and the Modern World (see also, chapter 2), scientists tend to abstract from the concrete fullness of life



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in a given situation to focus on specific empirical details and their relation to one another. Francis, as religious leader rather than scientist, points to the concern of Jesus for all God’s creatures as well as for human beings: “Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? And not one of them is forgotten before God (Lk. 12:6).”10 In the next chapter of his encyclical letter, however, he turns from arguments based on Scripture and church teaching to an analysis of the current state of the world as shaped by modern science and technology. “We are the beneficiaries of two centuries of enormous waves of change: steam engines, railways, the telegraph, electricity, automobiles, airplanes, chemical industries, modern medicine, information technology and, more recently, the digital revolution, robotics, biotechnologies and nanotechnologies.”11 These advances in science and technology have made human life on this earth much safer and comfortable; as such, they are evidence of divine as well as human creativity in using the resources of the earth. Yet “our immense technological development has not been accompanied by a development in human responsibility, values and conscience.”12 Furthermore, “humanity has taken up technology and its development according to an undifferentiated and onedimensional paradigm. This paradigm exalts the concept of a subject who, using logical and rational procedures, progressively approaches and gains control over an external object.”13 Francis is addressing here one of the key issues of my book, namely, whether a system should be closed or open-ended. In part 1, I argued that systems in the world of nature are open-ended, given the evolutionary character of the cosmic process. On the contrary, humanly contrived systems tend to be closed since they are conceived to achieve clearly defined goals and values that may or may not be for the common good (as opposed to self-centered goals and values). My argument, of course, was that humanly conceived systems should be likewise open-ended, as far as possible, since there is thereby far less risk of doing damage not only to the well-being of other human beings but also to a proper balance of forces in the world of nature. But this goal can only be achieved if human beings take responsibility for the systems that either they or their predecessors created and collectively take steps to revise them in the direction of the common good. Francis is thinking along the same lines: “Ecological culture cannot be reduced to a series of urgent and partial responses to the immediate problems of pollution, environmental decay and the depletion of natural resources. There needs to be a distinctive way of looking at things, a way of thinking, policies, an educational program, a lifestyle and a spirituality which together generate resistance to the assault of the technocratic paradigm.”14 Francis also points to the widespread sense of alienation in contemporary society: “[P]eople no longer seem to believe in a happy future; they no longer have blind trust in a better tomorrow based on the present state of the world and our technical abilities.”15 There is a need for the new

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anthropology that is based on the spiritual as well as the material needs of individuals. “When we fail to acknowledge as part of reality the worth of a poor person, a human embryo, a person with disabilities—to offer just a few examples—it becomes difficult to hear the cry of nature itself; everything is connected.”16 Intersubjectivity—that is, a feeling for the other—is needed to complement the passion for rational objectivity or means-end thinking, in dealing with other human beings, the world of nature, and ultimately God. In that same context, Francis urges a reconsideration of the meaning and value of work. “Underlying every form of work is a concept of the relationship which we can and must have with what is other than ourselves.”17 In the monastic tradition, work was seen as spiritually as well as materially meaningful. Even in today’s secularized society work can and should be the setting for personal growth, for example, creativity in planning for the future, developing one’s talents and living out one’s values, relating to others, giving glory to God. Hence, steady employment should be available to every adult human being. Francis ends this chapter of Laudato Si’ with an evaluation of new biological technologies. Citing the work of his predecessor, Pope John Paul II, Francis notes advances in molecular biology and genetics but claims that indiscriminate genetic manipulation ignores the potential long-term effects of gene change on the overall natural order.18 For, although genetic mutations inevitably come about as a result of spontaneity in the reproductive process, they do not happen at the rapid pace induced by contemporary advances in biotechnology, often without reflection on the long-term consequences for the overall environment. Genetically modified cereals, for example, have had in many cases unforeseen consequences: for example, the concentration of productive land in the hands of large corporations and the virtual disappearance of small family farms, the forced migration of rural farm workers to poverty-stricken urban areas in search of full employment, the negative effects of factory-farming on land resources and the overall natural environment, the polluting effects on the environment of transporting various food items to distant markets by land, sea, and air. Hence, prudential decisions must be made on the best way to use technology to feed and clothe an evergrowing world population, and these decisions should be made by consulting with all the various groups thereby involved: farmers, consumers, civil authorities, scientists, seed producers, and people living in the vicinity of fumigated fields.19 Pope Francis, accordingly, recommends what he calls an integral ecology, one based on several systems (environmental, economic, and social) in dynamic interrelation to constitute an all-embracing ecosystem, “When we speak of the ‘environment,’ what we really mean is a relationship existing between nature and the society which lives in it. Nature cannot be regarded as something separate from ourselves or as a mere setting in which we live.”20



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Hence, an environmental crisis is likewise a social crisis affecting how human beings live together. An ecosystem, accordingly, is a delicate balance between humanly designed and natural systems—that is, those which arose spontaneously in the process of cosmic evolution. Humanly designed systems are intentional and for that reason predetermined to achieve specific goals and values. Systems at work in the world of physical reality are spontaneous, based on reciprocal causal relations between their parts or members, and yet sufficiently determined by a balance between “ascendancy” and “overhead” to maintain a corporate identity for long periods.21 The danger for human beings in their efforts at system-building is to concentrate too much on the achievement of predetermined human goals and values and thereby endanger the balance between ascendancy and overhead within systems in the world of nature. Yet, if the systems at work in nature become imbalanced, humanly contrived systems will likewise start to collapse with severe consequences for human well-being and eventually for survival. “We urgently need a humanism capable of bringing together the different fields of knowledge, including economics, in the service of a more integral and integrating vision. Today, the analysis of environmental problems cannot be separated from the analysis of human, family, work-related and urban contexts, nor from how individuals relate to themselves, which leads in turn to how they relate to others and the environment.”22 Francis continues his commentary on an integral ecology with attention to what he calls cultural ecology. “Culture is more than what we have inherited from the past; it is also, and above all, a living, dynamic and participatory present reality, which cannot be excluded as we rethink the relationship between human beings and the environment.”23 Consumer-oriented or market-based economists, however, tend to ignore the effect of culture in dealing with complex economic issues. They employ abstract top-down analysis of presumably universal needs and desires of people everywhere instead of conducting concrete bottom-up surveys of what people in different cultural contexts want and expect. “The imposition of a dominant lifestyle linked to a single form of production can be just as harmful as the altering of ecosystems.”24 Along the same lines, the local neighborhoods in which human beings live have a profound effect on the way that people think, feel, and act. “In the unstable neighborhoods of mega-cities, the daily experience of overcrowding and social anonymity can create a sense of uprootedness which spawns antisocial behavior and violence.”5 Instead, what is needed is a sense of belonging or “being at home” both in one’s local neighborhood and in the city of which it is a part. “It is important that the different parts of a city be well integrated and that those who live there have a sense of the whole, rather than being confined to one neighborhood and failing to see the larger city as space which they share with others.”26 Not only should there be common civic celebrations, but also a carefully planned

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system of cheap public transportation that brings people together for those events in the city’s center.27 Pope Francis ends his comments on an integral ecology referring to the classic notion of the common good, above all, the responsibility of the current generation of human beings to provide a sustainable environment for future generations. The common good is “the sum of those conditions of social life which allow social groups and their members relatively thorough and ready access to their own fulfilment.”28 Francis sees this basic principle of human life as a summons to solidarity and especially as an obligation to provide for the needs of the poor and underprivileged in contemporary society. Concerning justice for future generations, he comments: “Once we start to think about the kind of world we are leaving to future generations, we look at things differently; we realize that the world is a gift which we have freely received and must share with others.”29 Once again, Francis is addressing one of the key issues of this book, namely, an over-emphasis on the rights of individuals vis-à-vis the groups to which they belong. One cannot attend simply to one’s own needs and the needs of one’s immediate family. Human beings live in a socially organized corporate reality or system in which each part or member must contribute to the well-being and survival of the whole, if only because the continued existence and well-being of the whole is crucial for the well-being and survival of all its parts or members. Pope Francis then moves from theory to praxis. He provides procedures for dialogue on an international, national, and local level about the consequences of climate change and about human responsibility to deal with those same environmental issues. On the international level, for example, solutions must be set forth and acted upon which serve the needs of all member countries, especially those with struggling economies, and not simply protect the interests and desires of the more affluent nations and of international corporations based in those countries. “Interdependence obliges us to think of one world with a common plan.”30 World summits on the environment have not lived up to expectations because, due to lack of political will, they were unable to reach truly meaningful global agreements on the environment and then take concrete steps to achieve them.31 For example, relatively affluent countries that have benefited from a high degree of industrialization at the cost of enormous emissions of greenhouse gases tend to ignore that they have a greater responsibility for bearing the expense of the reduction of those same gases worldwide than still developing countries. They should not expect poor countries to bear an equal share in those expenses. Rather, the top priority for developing countries should be instead to eliminate extreme poverty and to improve the social development of their people. Yet they should not ignore the role that they too play in sustaining a healthy environment. With financial assistance from more affluent nations, they should also be developing less polluting forms of energy production, for



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example, solar energy or wind power. At the same time, however, attention should likewise be given to the effects of these new energy-saving devices on the culture of the local population, for example, whether for cultural reasons they are actively resisted.32 In brief, then, easy solutions to worldwide environmental problems are simply not available. Transnational corporations, however, should, in any case, be held responsible for causing environmental pollution by business practices that are largely governed by the calculation of losses and gains in the marketplace rather than by what serves the common good. Yet none of these goals and values will be achieved unless and until a worldwide political body like the United Nations enforces regulations once they have been approved by the general assembly of delegates. Similar vigilance vis-à-vis care for the environment should likewise be maintained on the national and local levels of government. Admittedly, national political bodies may be reluctant to impose strict environmental standards on major international corporations out of fear of a negative reaction on the part of their citizens. The price of consumer goods might well rise for everyone and local businesses might lose their best chance for new foreign investment as a result. Yet “[t]rue statecraft is manifest when, in difficult times, we uphold high principles and think of the long-term common good.”33 On the local level, for example, political activity should be “directed to modifying consumption, developing an economy of waste disposal and recycling, protecting certain species and planning a diversified agriculture and the rotation of crops.”34 At all three levels (international, national, and local), however, dialogue among participants in the discussion of environmental policy should be transparent and wide-ranging. Focus, accordingly, should be on broad policies rather than on stop-gap interventions.35 Thus objective information should be gathered about the potential risks to the environment if a given policy is implemented. If sufficient doubt exists about the wisdom of the project, then it should not be implemented until that doubt is effectively eliminated by evidence to the contrary. For example, the worldwide financial crisis of 2007–2008 “provided an opportunity to develop a new economy, more attentive to ethical principles, and new ways of regulating speculative financial practices and virtual wealth. But the response to the crisis did not include rethinking the outdated criteria which continue to rule the world.”36 Hence, another worldwide financial crisis is still quite possible, if not likely. In either case, market forces should not be the principal factors in making decisions about the environment. Other principles like the promotion of a better quality of life for all human beings around the world should be the deciding factor in making decisions on environmental policy that would have a direct impact on that same quality of life for most people. “That is why the time has come to accept decreased growth in some parts of the world, in order to provide resources for other places to experience

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healthy growth. . . . A technological and economic development which does not leave in its wake a better world and an integrally higher quality of life cannot be considered progress.”37 Likewise, in the realm of politics (whether on the international, national, or local level), the principle of subsidiarity should be at work to enable all interested parties to participate in the decision-making process on key environmental issues. Otherwise, no investment will likely be made “to help the slow, the weak or the less talented to find opportunities in life.”38 Furthermore, graft and other forms of political corruption will almost certainly be present if people in positions of power within contemporary society have virtually a free hand in making decisions on environmental policy and all other politically significant issues. Concerning the role that scientists and other highly trained academics play in policymaking, Pope Francis first cautions that science does not offer a complete explanation of human life on this earth, but then adds: “Any technical solution which science claims to offer will be powerless to solve the serious problems of our world if humanity loses its compass, if we lose sight of the great motivations which make it possible for us to live in harmony, to make sacrifices and to treat others well.”39 This last comment by Francis provides a perfect introduction into the last chapter of his encyclical letter which is explicitly dedicated to the link between ecology and spirituality, theory and praxis. He begins with the following observation: “Since the market tends to promote extreme consumerism in an effort to sell its products, people can easily get caught up in a whirlwind of needless buying and spending.”40 They do not realize that they have surrendered their true freedom to say no to what they really do not need. Moreover, when people thus become more focused on the satisfaction of their own needs and desires, they ironically experience more anxiety and insecurity. Any sense of sacrificing one’s own needs and desires for the sake of the common good tends to disappear. “Yet all is not lost. Human beings, while capable of the worst, are also capable of rising above themselves, choosing again what is good, and making a new start, despite their mental and social conditioning.”41 Furthermore, this change in personal lifestyle could indirectly bring pressure to bear upon those who wield political, economic, and social power. For example, “[w]hen social pressure affects their earnings, businesses clearly have to find ways to produce differently.”42 So if individuals adopt a new lifestyle with a stronger sense of moral responsibility for what they purchase and consume, they can affect significant changes in the common good, the pattern of life in the community as a whole.43 Young people generally find a change of lifestyle somewhat easier to accept than older people, but education is still needed for young people consistently to adhere to a more ecologically aware approach to reality. “Yet this education, aimed at creating an ‘ecological citizenship,’ is at



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times limited to providing information and fails to instill good habits.”44 Instead, education for a better world should include concrete practices like recycling, reducing water consumption, not wasting food, showing care for other living beings, using public transportation or car-pooling, planting trees, saving electricity by turning off unnecessary lights at home and in the workplace. Ecological education, moreover, can take place in various settings (e.g., schools, church organizations), and through social media (radio, television, internet). But it is especially fitting within the immediate family in the education of children by their parents. Here personal example by parents, older family members, and friends of the family can have much more effect on the thinking and behavior of children than if these elder members of the family and community imposed strict rules and regulations for the preservation of the environment on the younger generation.45 What is needed within Christian families, therefore, is a lived-out spirituality as well as official conformity to Church teaching on the preservation of the environment and care for others in need. Beyond the immediate family, the local parish as a Christian community needs to undergo an ecological conversion. “Isolated individuals can lose their ability and freedom to escape the utilitarian mindset, and end up prey to an unethical consumerism bereft of social or ecological awareness. Social problems must be addressed by community networks and not simply by the sum of individual good deeds.”46 Pope Francis, accordingly, here proceeds to talk about civic and political love. This kind of love “makes itself felt in every action that seeks to build a better world. Love for society and commitment to the common good are outstanding expressions of a charity which affects not only relationships between individuals but also ‘macrorelationships, social, economic and political ones.”47 In this way, Christians find God in all things. The Sacraments of the church “are a privileged way in which nature is taken up by God to become a means of mediating supernatural life.”48 In the Eucharist, for example, the world of creation finds its exaltation. “Joined to the incarnate Son, present in the Eucharist, the whole cosmos gives thanks to God. Indeed, the Eucharist is itself an act of cosmic love.”49 Francis refers to the Christian doctrine of the Trinity to justify this immanence of God within creation even as the divine Trinitarian life at the same time transcends what is happening within the world of creation. “The world was created by the three Persons acting as a single divine principle, but each one of them performed this common work in accord with his own personal property.”50 That is, akin to the relations of Father, Son, and Spirit to one another within the divine life, the world of creation is socially organized as a communion of individual entities in dynamic interrelation, as “a web of relationships.”51 Eventually human beings and all of creation will be incorporated into that same divine life. Accordingly, Pope Francis ends his

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encyclical letter on care for our common home with two prayers: a generic one to God as Transcendent Source of all creation, the other addressed specifically to the persons of the Trinity, in both cases asking for divine assistance in safeguarding the dignity of the world of creation as embodying the Kingdom of God on earth.52 Laudato Si’ is a remarkable document. It aptly illustrates what Alfred North Whitehead said about the relation between religion and science in Science and the Modern World, namely, that the two strongest forces which influence human behavior are “the force of our religious intuitions, and the force of our impulse to accurate observation and logical deduction.”53 Unfortunately, as Whitehead also points out, religion and science are often understood as opposed to one another, given their differing truth-claims. But, as Pope Francis makes clear in writing this encyclical, in appropriate combination they are far more effective in promoting human efforts to “save the environment” than either of them individually. For, while reason alone may convince one that concrete action should be taken, feeling-level inspirations or moral convictions are most often needed actually to do what needs to be done. It is no accident that Pope Francis ends his encyclical letter on care for our common home not with an appeal to reason but with two heartfelt prayers for the well-being of the earth and all its inhabitants. The encyclical letter was favorably received not only in religious circles but also in at least one major scientific journal.54 The fact that Francis used the results of scientific research and the language of systems theory in setting forth his proposal of an integral ecology to solve the ills of environmental degradation impressed the scientific community. Upon reading the encyclical, the well-known environmentalist Bill McKibben commented: “the empirical data about climate change makes it clear that the moment is ripe for this encyclical. The long line of brown-robed gurus, of whom Francis is the latest, now marches next to scientists in lab coats; instead of scriptures, the physicists and chemists clutch the latest printout from their computer models, but the two ways of knowing seem to be converging on the same point.”55 Only appropriate conjunction of religious feeling and sober scientific reflection can motivate human beings to take steps to change what needs to be changed. The future of the human race and indeed of all life on this earth is at stake. Even while acknowledging the remarkable opportuneness of the encyclical, one should also bear in mind that, while Pope Francis uses the language of systems theory to analyze what has gone wrong in dealing with environmental problems and other urgent social issues, he does not probe into the historical and philosophical background of the current environmental crisis, in particular, how “an undifferentiated and one-dimensional paradigm” has completely taken over the methodology of contemporary science.56 For example, I have argued in this book that the roots of this short-sighted heavily



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individualistic approach to reality can ultimately be traced to Aristotle’s presuppositions that substances, individual entities existing in their own right, are the “building blocks” of physical reality. For, if too much attention is given to relations between individual entities, one tends to lose track of the common good—that is, the goals and values of life in community with other human beings and ultimately with all the other living creatures of this world. Admittedly, this tendency to “rugged individualism” has always been part of the human condition. But at the start of the early modern period of Western civilization, it was strongly reinforced by René Descartes’s celebrated dictum cogito, ergo sum (I think, therefore I am).57 It took time, of course, for educated human beings to realize that such a subjectively grounded worldview effectively undercuts the possibility of truth and objectivity in human value judgments and, perhaps even more important in the long run, in scientific research. To his credit, Immanuel Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason saw the need for a new starting point in human reflection on the workings of physical reality and proposed that the world of nature conforms to universal laws of the human mind rather than that the human mind conforms to universal laws of nature.58 When this theoretical assumption proved to be mistaken as a result of further studies in anthropology and social psychology, scientists and other educated people in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries avoided further metaphysical reflection and turned instead to a more elementary form of systems thinking. But, as I have tried to point out in this book, empirically based systems–thinking lends itself too readily to materialistic determinism with consequent loss of freedom for those affected by the system. Pope Francis was trained in philosophy as well as in theology during his seminary years. Hence, he must have been at least marginally aware of these developments in the history of Western philosophy from Descartes onward, but he did not allude to them explicitly in Laudato Si’. As a spiritual leader rather than a professional philosopher, he undoubtedly felt justified in not taking on that further responsibility. But the inevitable consequence of that choice was that he could offer no suitable alternative to the “undifferentiated and one-dimensional paradigm” that he finds so objectionable as the basis for assessing the results of scientific research and their application to modern technology. What he needed was a new evolutionary worldview with a much greater focus on the need for human beings and all the other living creatures of this world to collaborate in sustaining the common good, namely, a world in which individuals can take real satisfaction in working at goals and values valuable to the community as well as to themselves as individuals. Unfortunately, Pope Francis had few advisers in shaping a more contemporary worldview. Roman Catholic philosophers and theologians are still largely committed to the classical metaphysics of Being set forth by Aquinas and the scholastic tradition. Natural scientists have little or no interest in

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philosophical issues because they have had great success in using mathematics and quantitative measurement of empirical data to deal with the empirical data of the world of nature. Hence, Laudato Si, which is so admirable in its respect for the work of scientists in other ways, stills falls short in providing the common ground for a new round of discussion between philosophers, theologians, and representatives of the natural and social sciences. Yet there is still reason for optimism about the possibility of a fresh start in the religion-and-science discussion insofar as both sides now realize better than ever before that only together can they find practical solutions to significant social issues. Likewise, both groups now see much better the inevitable limitations of their disciplines. This is especially true for scientists, given the critiques of the early modern scientific method by philosophers of science like Henri Bergson and Alfred North Whitehead at the beginning of the twentieth century and individuals like Arran Gare and Robert Ulanowicz in more recent years. Likewise, Christian philosophers and theologians in increasing numbers have also slowly begun to question their heavy reliance on classical metaphysics to support their assertions about the nature of reality and the God-world relationship based on Scripture and Tradition (i.e., consistent church teaching). In any case, as Alfred North Whitehead pointed out in Science and the Modern World, it is certainly time for both sides to stop hurling anathemas at one another and begin to work together as mutual truth-seekers rather than as ideological opponents overly confident of the truthfulness of their statements simply based on their resources. NOTES  1. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 181–82.  2. Pope Francis, On Care for Our Common Home [Laudato Si’] (Washington, DC: United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, 2015).  3. Ibid., 9.  4. Ibid., 29.  5. Ibid., 1–3.  6. Ibid., 4.  7. Ibid., 32.  8. Ibid., 41.  9. Ibid., 45. 10.  Ibid., 47. 11.  Ibid., 49. 12.  Ibid., 51. 13. Ibid. 14.  Ibid., 54. 15.  Ibid., 55. 16.  Ibid., 57. 17.  Ibid., 61. 18.  Ibid., 63–64. 19.  Ibid., 65–66. 20.  Ibid., 67–68.



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21.  See earlier, Robert Ulanowicz, A Third Window, in chapter 6. 22. Pope Francis, On Care for Our Common Home, 69. 23.  Ibid., 70. 24.  Ibid., 71. 25.  Ibid., 73. 26.  Ibid., 73–74. 27.  Ibid., 74–75. 28.  Ibid., 76. See also Documents of Vatican II (New York: Guild Press, 1966): Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World at Vatican II (Gaudium et Spes), n. 26. 29.  Ibid., 77. 30.  Ibid., 80. 31.  Ibid., 81. 32.  Ibid., 84. 33.  Ibid., 87. 34.  Ibid., 88. 35.  Ibid., 89. 36.  Ibid., 92. 37.  Ibid., 94. 38.  Ibid., 95. 39.  Ibid., 97. 40.  Ibid., 99. 41.  Ibid., 100. 42. Ibid. 43.  See also Clayton and Schwartz, What Is Ecological Civilization, 113–45. The authors set forth multiple ways to change the pattern of buying and selling in today’s international economic system. 44.  Ibid., 102. 45.  Ibid., 103–4. 46.  Ibid., 106. 47.  Ibid., 111. Pope Francis is here citing an encyclical letter of his predecessor, Benedict XVI, Charity in Truth (Caritas in Veritate) released for publication in June 2009. 48.  Ibid., 113. 49.  Ibid., 114. 50.  Ibid., 115. 51. Ibid., 116. See also my systems-oriented approach to the doctrine of the Trinity in chapter 7. 52.  Ibid., 118–20. 53. Whitehead, Science and the Modern World, 181–82. 54.  See “Hope, from the Pope,” Nature 522 (June 25, 2015): 391. 55. Bill McKibben, “Introduction,” in For Our Common Home: Process-Relational Responses to Laudato Si’, eds. John B. Cobb Jr. and Ignacio Castuera (Anoka, MN: Process Century Press, 2015), 8. 56.  Pope Francis, On Care for Our Common Home, 51. 57.  René Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, III, 1:165–66 in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, 2 vols., trans. Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). 58.  “Preface to Second Edition,” in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1956), B xvi (p. 22).

Chapter Nine

Summary and Critical Evaluation of My Hypothesis

My basic purpose in writing this book has been to lay the groundwork for a process-oriented metaphysics based on a new understanding of the reciprocal relation between the component parts of a system and the system itself as a corporate reality in its own right. For example, whereas classical metaphysics is chiefly governed by efficient causality and top-down causation, within a process- or systems-oriented metaphysics multiple causes are simultaneously at work but especially efficient causality from the bottom up. That is, efficient causality within the system is located in the dynamic exchange of information between the component parts of the system, namely, mini-organisms responsive to one another’s existence and activity. The formal causality of the system is located in the common element of form or governing structure of the system as an objective reality in its own right. Hence, the system is more than simply the sum of its inert parts or members from moment to moment. Instead, it is a cumulative reality, remaining basically the same and yet subtly changing in its governing structure from moment to moment. The system, accordingly, is necessarily open-ended, not closed or predetermined in its mode of operation. Thus it functions as an organic unity-in-diversity of parts or members, namely, as an entitative reality that is conditioned but not predetermined by its history and anticipated future. Furthermore, the concept of open-ended systems with interactive parts or members could well serve as the foundational principle in the efforts of those working in both the natural sciences and the humanities to come to mutual understanding and agreement on issues of common concern for life in contemporary society. For, while scientists and theologians would be appealing to different resources (either the results of empirical testing of a given scientific hypothesis or interpretation of authoritative texts within a given 133

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religious tradition), they would at the same time be using the same reciprocal part-whole relation view to integrate these more specialized truth-claims. Logically then both scientists and theologians should admit the fallibility of their respective positions on the resolution of complex issues in contemporary society. Neither side can objectively claim to possess the whole truth about whatever is at stake in their ongoing discussion since all interpretations of reality by definition are perspectival, limited by the existential framework of the interpreter and his/her readers at the time. The door to compromise in the practical order (what to do and how to do it) is thus in principle always open. Given these preliminary remarks, all that remains to be done in this summary and evaluation of my hypothesis is to make clear how a systems-oriented approach to reality clarifies the reciprocal relation between the whole and its constituent parts or members in each of the preceding chapters. In the Introduction, for example, I contended that feelings of passivity and alienation among individual human beings are widely spread in contemporary society. For, the human beings thus negatively affected have not sufficiently taken into account the positive features of the reciprocal causal relation between themselves and the various systems (economic, political, cultural) to which they belong. For, given this reciprocal causal relation, human beings can change the system in question if they work at it collaboratively. Admittedly, single individuals who grumble against a system that oppresses them stand little chance of making any changes on their own. The size and scope of the system will in due time overcome their initial enthusiasm for restructuring it and they will lapse into the same sense of helplessness and despondency from which they started. Only those who work together on a common project will supply needed support to one another. An even deeper problem, of course, is that, while Western civilization began with a new focus on self-awareness and the realization that one had rights vis-à-vis other human beings that must be defended at all costs, that significant insight has over the centuries led to an exaggerated emphasis on the conflictual character of human life in which individuals must actively compete with one another for the good things in life. But here too, given the proper model for the relationship between the individual and the group mentioned earlier, that need not be the case. Instead one can substitute the model of living together on a collaborative basis to achieve goals and values for both the individual and the group. Furthermore, since this paradigm for a reciprocal relation between constituent parts or members and the system to which they belong is not limited to the interaction of human beings with one another, but can also be applied to the interactions of all individual entities with one another, one has in effect a new worldview, one that shifts from an emphasis on rugged individualism to a heightened sense of the common good in dealing with environmental problems and related social issues.



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Then in the first chapter of the book, after reviewing and evaluating the philosophy of Henri Bergson, I concluded that events rather than individual entities should be considered as the basic constituents of physical reality. For, individual events have little or no significance in and of themselves. They are moments in a historical process in which the reality of past events conditions the reality of events in the present and the combined reality of past and present events will invariably condition the reality of events in the future. That is, the individual event is contributing to a longer-lasting and socially constituted reality that is more than and other than the sum of its individual events from moment to moment. Yet the individual event is still an indispensable part or member of this process-oriented reality. Without a continuous succession of events, a qualitative whole or ever-growing ontological reality would cease to exist. Likewise in chapter 2, after reviewing the metaphysical scheme of Alfred North Whitehead with its focus on actual entities as momentary selfconstituting subjects of experience, I came also to the conclusion that these individual psychic events must themselves be momentary self-constituting subjects of experience since otherwise they could not be influenced by their predecessors nor influence their successors in co-producing an everincreasing qualitative whole. Whitehead basically conceived actual entities in the same way, but he failed to reflect more deeply on the resultant ontological status of societies, namely, what happens as a result of dynamically interrelated actual entities in rapid succession. Societies of actual entities in Whitehead’s view are not subjects of experience and thus do not exercise agency in their own right. But societies still possess an internal unity of parts or members from moment to moment. My position here is that societies only endure in time if they exercise agency or efficient causality in and through their ever-changing parts or members as momentary self-constituting subjects of experience in ongoing interaction. For example, as a human being, I exercise agency or efficient causality in and through the ongoing interaction of my body, mind, and soul as sub-agencies. Thus I can affirm more strongly than Whitehead did in Process and Reality that what he called societies are more than simply aggregates of actual entities genetically linked to one another. They are higher-order realities, qualitative wholes existing in their own right, albeit only in virtue of the interaction of their constituent actual entities from the moment. In chapter 2, I also referred to Stuart Kauffman, Terrence Deacon, and Jesper Hoffmeyer because they are natural scientists interested in systems theory as a potential explanation for the emergence of life and consciousness within the cosmic process. That is, all three believe that thermodynamic, morphodynamic, and teleodynamic systems exercise agency vis-à-vis one another within the world of nature. Moreover, in and through the dynamic interaction of these lower-level systems they co-produce higher-order more

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complex systems that in dynamic interaction offer a fully naturalistic explanation for the emergence of life and consciousness out of nonliving inert entities (atoms). Thereby, however, these natural scientists either overlooked or chose to ignore Whitehead’s claim that societies or systems exercise causal agency only in and through the dynamic interaction of their component parts. As a result, they indirectly created for themselves a major conceptual problem, namely, how lower-order nonliving systems can bring into existence a new higher-order system that in many cases is both alive and self-aware. Deacon, for example, argues that when a sufficient number and diversity of inanimate components are mixed together, life emerges. That, however, is an empirically based statement of what frequently happens, but not a causal explanation of why it happens. Only if these natural scientists take account of the reciprocal causal relations between parts and wholes and concede that the component parts are already in some measure alive, not completely dead, will they have a more consistent explanation of the emergence first of life and then of self-awareness within the cosmic process. Hence, they may be inadvertently guilty of what Whitehead calls “the fallacy of misplaced concreteness,” namely, substituting the clear-cut precision of a mathematical equation for careful observation of what is really happening. Jesper Hoffmeyer, based on careful empirical investigation, concludes that higher-order more complex molecules trade “signs” or information with one another, thereby indicating that they are in some measure alive. But he still conjectures that these more complex molecules are themselves emergent from non-living atomic components. As a result, he only reduced but not eliminated the dilemma that life is somehow emergent out of ultimately nonliving components. The subsequent effect is greater than its antecedent cause. Accordingly, I tried another version of systems theory based on openended systems. One of the pioneers in systems thinking, Alexander Bogdanov, is a good starting point. With his notion of “complex,” namely, an entity that both reflects the conditions of the environment in which it is located and actively adapts its internal self-constitution to it, he evidently had in mind the same causal relation between parts and wholes that I envision in my understanding of open-ended systems. Ludwig von Bertalanffy, to be sure, broadened the scope of Bogdanov’s work with his own General Systems Theory, the study of both natural and man-made systems. This linking of natural and humanly constructed systems is, however, risky in its further philosophical implications. Only in the work of Ervin László does ontology—that is, the way that the world works—take priority over Epistemology, the way that the human mind works. In an early work, Introduction to Systems Philosophy, for example, László substitutes the term “structured field of activity” for “system” as the governing paradigm in his metaphysical scheme. Here he seems to have in mind the notion of a reciprocal causal relation between parts and wholes. That is, an already existing structured field of activity



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necessarily puts constraints on the shape of the events successively taking place within it, but the events in turn gradually alter the configuration of the field by their dynamic exchange of energy and information with one another from moment to moment. With Norbert Weiner’s book Cybernetics, however, the theory of stimulus and response (feedback) that worked so well in analyzing the elementary growth and development of plant and animal life was transferred to the understanding and control of purely mechanical electronic devices (e.g., guided missile systems). This linkage between living and nonliving systems eventually resulted in the development of the new field of artificial intelligence. Computers were designed to mimic human thought processes, even to surpass in speed and efficiency the workings of the human mind. Yet computers and other electronic devices are not self-replicating that adapt spontaneously to new and unexpected contexts. They have to be reprogrammed by a human being to work properly again under new and different circumstances. Not surprisingly, Niklas Luhmann, a contemporary social scientist, further claims that true objectivity can be only achieved if systems thinkers focus on the rule-bound sequence of objective events rather than on the subjective intentions of system designers. Systems, in other words, exercise agency in their own right and thus can affect one another directly through a process of “structural coupling.” Systems are thus self-referential in that they can set up the rules for their internal operation and for their engagement with other systems in their environment even though their component parts or members are inanimate “elements,” not entities that are alive or responsive to one another within the system. In response, I postulate that systems are in the first place indeterminate and open-ended, thus capable of gradual evolution or change of form in their mode of operation. There are indeed closed systems, but they are in my view unconscious abstractions or simplifications of the various kinds of openended systems at work in the natural world. Furthermore, even such inanimate systems presumably came into existence and even now are sustained by component parts or members that are to some degree responsive to one another to be able to co-generate further higher-order and more complex systems. The constituent parts, in other words, share in the higher-order vitality of the whole, and the vitality of the whole is in turn conditions the antecedent vitality of its constituent parts or members. My inspiration for this line of thought is admittedly derivative from A. N. Whitehead’s analysis of the reciprocal causal relation between actual entities and the societies to which they belong in Process and Reality (see also, chapter 2). But Whitehead was understandably ambivalent about the consequent ontological status of societies. For, to identify a society as a substance was risky because his hypothesis would logically be judged in terms of a substance-accident approach to reality foreign to his mindset in

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which component parts and the whole are necessarily intertwined. Yet in my judgment, Whitehead is still correct in maintaining that societies or systems do not directly exercise agency. Whatever agency the society possesses is motivated by the dynamic interplay of their constituent parts or members. From moment to moment, for example, I make decisions and take actions only in virtue of all the various subagencies at work in my mind and body. My line of thought is grounded here in the assumption of reciprocal causal relations between parts and wholes. A whole is always other than its parts but is at the same time dependent on its existence and activity upon the various subagencies at work in the parts or members from moment to moment. Parts and wholes are thus together a single nondual reality; neither can exist without the other. Next, in part 2 of this book, I asked why contemporary natural scientists are reluctant to give up a traditional mechanistic approach to physical reality in favor of this more dynamic approach to reality. I rely here on two experts in the field. Arran Gare, associate professor of philosophy and cultural inquiry at Swinburne University in Melbourne, Australia, claims that the basic philosophical assumptions of contemporary natural science are simply not well suited to diagnose and provide a suitable remedy for major problems in contemporary society: for example, the environmental crisis brought on by human misuse of nature’s resources over the centuries. What is needed instead is a new worldview, one inspired by the philosophy of the German Idealist Friedrich Schelling. Schelling proposed that the world of nature provides the necessary infrastructure for the life of the spirit, above all in human beings but likewise in all of nature. That is, human beings are the highest manifestation of powers (Potenzen) that have been at work in the world of nature from the very beginning of the cosmic process. Matter and spirit are thus insolubly linked together so that neither exercises ontological priority over the other. In this way, Schelling’s philosophy is distinct both from absolute idealism (e.g., the philosophy of Hegel) and later from materialism (e.g., Marxism). Gare labels Schelling’s philosophy speculative naturalism (i.e., a naturalism that is not specifically theistic in its scope but still open to inclusion of the divine spirit in its regular mode of operation). This understanding of the reciprocal relation between matter and spirit within the cosmic process is, of course, fully in accord with my model for the causal relation between parts and wholes described earlier. That is, the spirit is for me the immaterial principle of self-organization in both individual entities and larger corporately constituted institutions. In each case, spirit resides in the first place in the whole but is also found in the mode of operation of each of the parts according to the role that it plays in co-constituting the reality of the whole. Logically opposed to such a reciprocal relation between spirit and matter, of course, is scientism. That is, only what can be empirically analyzed and



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mathematically measured is real. Upon reflection, however, scientism as an approach to reality seeks only to control the forces of nature for the sake of relatively short-term goals and values. Moreover, these short-term goals and values more often than not end up serving the economic and political interests of the rich and powerful rather than the real needs of ordinary people. Robert Ulanowicz, emeritus professor at the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, has written a book on ecology as the preferred “window” for understanding the workings of physical reality. Ulanowicz thus seeks to go beyond reductionism, the first window on the world captured in the Newtonian worldview with its never-changing or time-reversible laws. He also takes exception to Darwin’s second window on the world with his historically grounded theory of the origin of species through natural selection. That is, while Darwin conceded that evolution as a historical reality always remains somewhat contingent in its outcome, he still imagined natural selection as akin to a purely mechanical process. Entities with a fixed mode of operation either adapt or fail to adapt to their external environment. But Darwin thereby failed to take into account that this is not simply due to pure chance. If the members of the various species are organisms, then they are individually capable of internal change and development through interaction with their environment. Ulanowicz himself, on the contrary, claims that a process is a succession of random events. It is in my view rather a succession of contingent events—that is, events with some measure of predictability, given the “constraints” imposed upon their self-constitution by their place in a historical succession of events. Ulanowicz could have profited here from reflection on Whitehead’s premise that actual entities as self-constituting subjects of experience are heavily influenced in their self-constitution both by their historical predecessors and by their potential successors within the society to which they belong. Either way, of course, evolution is indeterminate or open-ended. Its precise outcome from moment to moment can never be predicted, given all the contingencies at work in the historical process as a whole. At the same time, the result at any given moment is not totally unpredictable, pure chaos. Ulanowicz follows Karl Popper in referring to propensities rather than laws to guarantee order and regularity within the evolutionary process. Even more important for maintaining continuity, however, is the tendency of individual processes to become engaged with other kindred processes to be itself affected as a result. What would have been indeterminate is made determinate by its presence in a causal chain. Ulanowicz, however, further claims that some measure of final causality is also at work here as well as the normal efficient causality of a causal chain. That is, the causal chain has an inbuilt “propensity” to produce one particular kind of outcome. What results is “autocatalysis,” namely, the propensity for each new member

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of the chain to “facilitate” the occurrence of the next member of the chain in the same direction as its predecessors. Hence, the feedback mechanism does not run amok but results in a fixed pattern or configuration in its mode of operation. In this way, a system can endure over time and be successfully reestablished if ever disturbed by external forces. But its mode of operation is not thereby purely mechanical; a certain amount of contingency is still present to keep the system open-ended rather than closed. Another positive feature of an autocatalytic system is its “centripetality” in interaction with the environment. That is, it engages in a resource exchange with the environment so that it both draws from and contributes to the overall well-being of the system at the same time. In this way, the internal process of autocatalysis replaces the purely extrinsic cause-effect relations of Darwinian natural selection as the more natural way to determine which components of a system survive and prosper and which components do not. Competition between components of an autocatalytic system for use of available resources will therefore inevitably be present but such competition, in the end, should further the well-being and further development of the system as a whole. Competition, in other words, should yield mutuality and increased well-being for all the surviving components of the system. In this way, an autocatalytic system can “heal itself” and survive minor disturbances coming from the environment. In addition, an autocatalytic system of sufficient size and complexity will begin to exhibit some degree of autonomy from its components. That is, while in the early stages of an autocatalytic system, its components exhibit little or no spontaneity in their interaction with one another and the mode of operation of the system remains constant and unvarying, in later stages, such spontaneity among the components results in a new life-form with a mode of operation different from that of its components. Growth in size and complexity has taken place. For example, it is not enough simply to appeal to statistical laws in the calculation of results within a multilevel autocatalytic system. Components at the upper level of the system can influence the workings of components at the lower level through top-down causation, and components at the lower level of the system can influence the mode of operation of components at the upper level through bottom-up causation. Thus no strict pattern of top-down cause-effect relations (such as is taken for granted in classical metaphysics) is possible. Furthermore, in line with the precepts of chaos theory, classical laws of cause and effect cannot explain how a minor event at an early stage of a process can have a major effect on events at a later stage of the process. In brief, then, anyone looking through the “third window” on the workings of physical reality will see, not a world of relatively fixed individual entities with strictly contingent relations to one another, but a world of dynamically interrelated events that together produce the manifest reality of a hierarchically organized system of systems.



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Ulanowicz does not openly endorse Whitehead’s notion of actual entity, namely, that the ultimate constituents of physical reality are immaterial subjects of experience as well as objects of perception. But he does propose that “proto-ecological systems” may well have antedated “proto-organisms.” That is, closed-circuit systems of inanimate components are self-sustaining and thus exhibit enough animation to be the forerunners of the most primitive types of organisms. Being an organism, in other words, is then the second, not the first, step in the self-organization of material reality. For, an immaterial principle of self-organization is needed from the beginning, even in the interaction between seemingly inanimate molecules and atoms. In principle, then, one can thereby account both for the emergence of material entities and later for the emergence of life out of a series of dynamically interconnected events, beginning with the explosion of subatomic “particles” at the moment of the Big Bang, the origin of the universe. In any case, I agree here with Ulanowicz that processes produce the reality of people and things, not vice versa. I only add that processes as ordered sequences of events with a spontaneous principle of self-organization must possess a modest measure of subjectivity that does not involve mentality or self-awareness but only receptivity and responsiveness to other entities/events and the external environment. Natural scientists who are accustomed to looking at external reality through the first or second “windows”—that is, the Newtonian or Darwinian worldviews—will certainly object that what appears to be a chance event is actually due to ignorance of all the laws at work in the situation. But this argument is an unproven belief statement on their part, not a rational argument based on empirical evidence. Still, others might object that Ulaowicz’s event-oriented approach to reality is too complicated for use in practical life, above all in applying the results of science to modern technology. Yet in both of these arguments, one is “saving the appearances,” sacrificing logical consistency to the felt need for an easier, more readily apparent, solution. Both Arran Gare and Robert Ulanowicz critiqued the reductionistic and implicitly materialistic approach to the physical reality of natural science that began in the early modern period with the appeal to mathematics to formulate the laws of nature, but that has continued to the present day in many disciplines, above all at the foundational level of physics and chemistry. But, while this unconscious blend of methodological naturalism with ontological naturalism has borne fruit in the rapid growth of technology, it has also indirectly been responsible for the spread of a market-oriented economy which, as Gare points out, has unfortunately worked mainly for the increased well-being of the rich and the powerful at the expense of the poor and underprivileged. As a result, a widespread feeling of isolation and alienation within Western civilization (see also the introduction) has developed that does not bode well for dealing with environmental and other urgent social issues that require a communal response—that is, personal responsibility to

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preserve the common good. In response, both Gare and Ulanowicz strongly recommend a systems-oriented approach to reality that is not deterministic but open-ended in its mode of operation. The next chapter (chapter 5) is devoted to the critical analysis of Granville Henry’s presentation of the complex relationship between religion and science in terms of basic concepts and images used in both disciplines. For, if a neutral set of concepts and images could thereby be agreed upon by all parties, then scientists and theologians could significantly assist one another in dealing with important social issues. Henry states his argument in three interrelated theses. (1) Christian philosophers and scientists normally accept good science. Hence, they normally incorporate a given scientific understanding of reality into their interpretation of key passages in the Bible. (2) Conflict between science and religion occurs when religious leaders, after accepting a given scientific approach to reality into their theology, are confronted by a new and different scientific understanding of reality that in turn challenges their traditional theological interpretation of key passages in the Bible. (3) Yet this new scientific approach to reality is almost inevitably cloaked in philosophical concepts that would be quite useful to philosophers and theologians in setting forth a more up-to-date understanding of those same Biblical texts. As a result, these same philosophers and theologians should be eager to find coherence between a new and different scientific worldview and their own traditional religious beliefs as grounded in Sacred Scripture. But science continually changes content and methodology. When that happens, theologians tend to defend the older scientific worldview, albeit from a perspective based more on religious than strictly rational grounds. As a consequence, conventional Christians tend to believe that contemporary science is hostile to a religious outlook on life. For their part, scientists as more empirically oriented thinkers are understandably reluctant to engage with philosophers and theologians in the philosophical and theological implications of their scientific hypotheses even though they too recognize that they could use the help of philosophers and theologians to assess the significance and value of their current research in terms of the common good (i.e., the long-term goals and values of the various communities to which they belong). The full details of Henry’s review of the historical relation between religion and science in Western civilization can be read in chapter 5 of this book. All that I wish to add here and now by way of personal comment on Henry’s thesis is that he relied too heavily on Whitehead’s understanding of process thought and not enough on his own experience as a Christian believer. That is, Whitehead was a philosopher of science, not a Christian theologian. Hence, his presentation of the God-world relation in Process and Reality is theologically neutral, raising questions about traditional Christian belief. In part 5 of Process and Reality, for example, he seems to reduce God to an



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indispensable component in a cosmic process ruled by Creativity. That is, God is the unchanging principle of unity and the world is the ever-changing principle of multiplicity within the cosmic process. God and the world are thus rival principles that are kept in productive tension by Creativity as “the principle of novelty” within the cosmic process. Thus understood, however, Christian belief in God is more akin to deism than to classical theism. That is, not God but the cosmic process represents Ultimate Reality. God too is an “instantiation” of Creativity, although as an underlying activity, not as a transcendent entity or Creator God. Second, Henry believes that Whitehead’s philosophy supersedes and thereby replaces classical metaphysics. Whitehead himself, however, stated at the beginning of Process and Reality that philosophers can never hope to formulate the metaphysical first principles of physical reality. I too agree with Whitehead that these two thought systems, when properly understood, complement one another, with classical metaphysics focusing more on stability within the cosmic process and with Whitehead’s cosmology focusing on ongoing change within that same process. In further dialogue with classical metaphysicians, contemporary disciples of Whitehead might well be better disposed to accept the notion of society as a system or objective reality in its own right. For, the notion of society as system provides the same measure of stability and permanence that the notion of substance in classical metaphysics emphasizes. Otherwise, the Whiteheadian emphasis on actual entities (momentary self-constituting subjects of experience) can lend itself to an over-emphasis on change. I am not, however, thereby recommending that process-oriented thinkers get together with proponents of classical metaphysics to create a new philosophia perennis, a metaphysics that will never be superseded by any other future philosophical scheme. Rather, in line with the governing thesis of this book, namely, a reciprocal causal relation between constituent parts and the whole to which they belong, I would recommend that proponents of differing worldviews learn from one another in rethinking and revising their different understanding of reality and the God-world relationship. For, Ultimate Reality cannot be fully comprehended by any humanly conceived world view. All share in the effort to understand and appreciate that which by definition is beyond human comprehension. Ironically, of course, this is also true of human understanding of the full reality of an individual atom as well as the complex reality of the universe. For, Truth is (at least in my view) the result of an ongoing process, a growing consensus of subjective interpretations of a given fact’s enduring meaning and value. Moreover, part 3 of this book illustrates my last point about Truth as an ongoing process rather than a definitive statement of fact. In chapters 6 to 8 of part 3, I offer three different ways to use a systems-oriented approach both to physical reality and to the God-world relationship to deal more effectively

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with one and the same issue, namely, how to solve an environmental crisis. In chapter 6, for example, I begin with Holmes Rolston’s presentation of a rationally based environmental ethic in which a combination of lower-order systems can bring about the gradual emergence of higher-order systems that in turn provide the infra-structure for the workings of lower-order systems. Then in chapter 7 I indicate how a similar part-whole relation can alter one’s rational understanding and/or objective credibility of basic Christian beliefs (e.g., God as Trinity, the Incarnation of the Divine Word in the historical personhood of Jesus, and subjective immortality for human beings and the world of creation within the everlasting divine life). Thereby I provide a needed philosophical underpinning for a life of religiously oriented service to others. Finally, in chapter 8 I provide a striking example of how reason and revelation can be reasonably combined to change unjust conditions in contemporary civil society. That is, I called attention to the recent encyclical letter of Pope Francis on Care for Our Common Home or the environment. Written from the perspective of traditional church teaching on social justice and the common good, it still makes use of the concepts and principles of systems theory to interpret and deal with deteriorating conditions in contemporary society. The Pope thereby made clear from his statement in the encyclical letter his appreciation of the value of recent scientific research to the presentation of the Gospel message. The scientific community in turn warmly recommended to its members a careful reading of the Pope’s reflections on the need for both a personal and a collective conversion of heart to deal with the challenge of the environmental crisis. What I have presented in this book by way of a new systems-oriented worldview is, of course, not a perfect solution to all current social problems. No single philosophical scheme ever fully corresponds with the nature of reality at any given moment in human history. Furthermore, the reality of the world continues to evolve and human understanding of the world necessarily evolves with it. But one must keep working at new and better conceptual models on how to live, to live well, and to live better as time goes on. In that spirit, I set forth my proposal for a new world view that might in its way contribute positively to the resolution of two interrelated issues in contemporary Western society, namely, the urgency of the current environmental crisis and yet a relatively passive approach on the part of the public in dealing with it effectively.

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Index

Althusser, Louis, 60 Aquinas, Thomas, viii, 19, 35, 52, 79, 102, 129; Causa Sui, 52 Aristotle, viii, 19, 62, 94, 128; classical metaphysics, x, 22, 29, 30, 48, 128; Unmoved Mover, 34, 35 astronometers, early Greek, 73–74, 75; acceptability of good science, 74; influence on religious beliefs, 75; new scientific discoveries, 74 atomism, 24, 25, 31, 40, 47–48, 50, 53 Augustine, 102 Averroȅs, 81 Bachelard, Gaston, 60 Badiou, Alain, 61 behaviorism, 77 Berger, Peter, 52 Bergson, Henri, x, 4–5, 19, 102, 130 Berkeley, George, xi–xii Bertalanffy, Ludwig von, x, 42 Body-Mind relation, 23, 27, 76 Body-Soul relation, 76, 104 Bogdanov, Alexander, x, 41; Tektology, 41 Born, Max, 78 Bourdieu, Pierre, 60 Brahe, Tycho, 22

Broglie, Louis de, 78 Buber, Martin, vii, 81; I-It rational relationship with God in science, 81; I-Thou felt relationship with God in prayer, 82; I-Thou Relation, viii, 81 Buddhism, 34 change, 13, 40, 48; continuous, 13, 40; discontinuous, 13 creativity, 4, 24, 34, 47–48 Creator God, 51, 75, 76; Big Bang theory/creation, 78–79; creatio ex nihilo, 80; objective/subjective, 80; Penrose, Roger/Hawking, Stephen, 78; Penzias, Arno/Wilson, Robert, 78; resurrection of the body/ Immortality, 80; trinity, doctrine of, 80 Darwin, Charles, 6, 50, 64, 65, 68, 76; Mendel, Gregor, 76; natural selection, 76 Deacon, Terrence, 48–49, 50; change, 48; contragrade/orthograde process, 49 Descartes, René, 13, 20, 76, 120, 129 dogmatism, 24 duration, 5, 12, 14, 15 149

150

Index

emergence of life from non-life, 101 energy-field, 24, 114; particles, 24, 26; waves, 24, 26 eternal objects, 27 event, 3, 22–23, 64, 67, 77; energyevent, 32; random/contingent, 64 Feyerabend, Paul, 60 final causality, 11, 54, 61, 65, 139; constraint/formal causality, 60 finalism, 6 Foucault, Michel, 60 Freedom of Choice, 77–78 Freud, Sigmund, 77 Galileo, 13, 20, 22 Gare, Arran, viii, xi, 53–54, 59–63, 130; environmental crisis, 59, 95; naturalism, speculative, 59; Schelling, Friedrich, 59–60, 63 God, Principle of Concretion, 27–28; adventure of the spirit, 28 growth, 65–66; ascendancy, 66–67, 69–70; causal fold, 70; overhead, 66–67, 69–70 Hawking, Stephen, x–xi Heisenberg, Werner, 78 Henry, Granville, 53–54, 73–82; Bentham, Jeremy, 61; Hobbes, John, 61; Hume, David, 76; individualism, rugged, ix; Locke, John, 61, 104–5; religion and science, 73–82; Smith, Adam, 61; Spenser, Herbert, 61 Hume, David, 77 Incompleteness Theorem, Gödel’s, 78 instinct, 7–8, 14 intelligence, 7–8, 15, 21 intelligent design, 69–70; Behe, Michael, 69–70; Demski, William, 69–70 intersubjectivity, 45–47, 77; Hoffmeyer, Jesper, 45–46, 50; Adventures of Ideas, 46–47 intuition, 5–15, 21 Islam, 34

Kant, Immanuel, 129 Kauffman, Stuart, 47–48; Constraint Closure, 48 Keller, Evelyn Fox, 50 Kepler, Johannes, 22 Kingdom of God, 103 Kuhn, Thomas, 60 Lakatos, Imre, 60 Lamarck, Jean Baptiste, 7 Laudato Si’/On Care for Ourommon Home, 119–22; alienation and intersubjectivity, 121–22; care for future generations, especially the poor, 126; church teaching on common good, 120; cultural ecology: nature and spirit interdependent, 123; fallacy of misplaced concreteness in decisions on common good, 121; genetics and molecular biology, 122; integral ecology: subsystems as members of ecosystems, 123; open-ended vs. closed systems, 121; technology, modern; not geared to common good, 120; theory and praxis recycling, water consumption, 126 laws of nature, ix–x, 20, 21, 51; chance, 24, 40; propensities, 65 Lázló, Ervin, 42–43; Akasha, 42–43; hierarchy of systems, 42, 62 Leclerc, Ivor, 102 Leibniz, Gottfried, 6, 13, 76 Leopold, Aldo, 62–63 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 60 Locke, John, 20, 76 Luhmann, Niklas, and self-creative systems, 43–44 Marx, Karl, 60, 61 materialism, 69; methodological, 69; ontological, 69 McGrath, Alister, ix–x McIntyre, Alasdair, 60, 62–63 McKibben, Bill: basic approval of Laudato Si’/Our Common Home, 50, 121–28



Index 151

mechanism/determinism, 4, 12–13, 21, 29, 51, 75 mechanism, 6 Morris, Simon Conway, 50 Nagel, Thomas, 50 Newton, Isaac, 14, 22, 51, 64, 67, 75, 81 order/disorder, 9–10, 32; nineteenth century romantic poets, 23–24 organism, ix–x, 3, 5, 24–25, 47, 53, 69, 70–71, 94; actual entity, x, 3, 29–30, 32, 53, 102; common element of form, 33, 104; common good, 40, 104–5; contingency, 4, 67–68, 78; creativity, 4, 63–63; inanimate entity, 5, 24, 51; individual/corporate entities, 39–40; initial aims, 34, 77; nexus, 29–30; non-duality, 3; person: either process or entity or both, 101; prehension, 30, 34–35; society/ community, ix–x, 22, 29–30, 30, 31, 33, 79, 127–28; structured field of activity, 31; “superject,” 3; unilateral causality, 3; unity of actively engaged parts or members, 39–40, 53 panentheism, xi–xii, 98 patterns, 27, 61–62, 80, 94 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 50, 60, 62–63 personhood, human: One and the Many, 101–2, 103–4 Peters, Ted, on the Trinity, 105–15; Barth, Karl, 105; Boff, Leonardo: Trinity as community of entities or activities?, 109–10; Bracken, Joseph, danger of tritheism with process-oriented theologians, 110–11; Bracken, Joseph, essence or activity?, 107–8; Bracken’s critique of past, present, future, 112; finitude of divine persons in perichoresis, 106; Hegel, Georg, 105; Jensen, Robert: one temporal event, three identities, 111; Jüngel, Eberhard: God in human form, 105–4; LaCugna, Catherine:

Rahner’s rule true or false?, 111; Moltmann, Jürgen: perichoresis of divine persons, 108–9; Pannenberg, Wolfhart: immanent or economic trinity?, 112–13; Rahner, Karl, 106– 7; shared critique of Psnnenberg, 113–14; Torrance, Thomas F., 106–7; Trinity: immanent or economic?, 107–8; tritheism, 107–8; unscientific use of “field” imagery, 114; whole as higher-order totality of parts or members, 109–10 Piaget, Jean, 60 Polanyi, Michael, 60 Pope Francis, viii, ix–x, 119–28 Popper, Karl, 65; propensities, 65 potentiality to actuality, 5, 28, 29 prehension, 30, 102 proto-organisms, 69 reciprocal causality, 21, 77, 119 Ricoeur, Paul, 60 Rolston, Holmes, III, xi, 87–98; altruism for all forms of life, 89; biocentrism vs. anthropocentrism, 92; capitalism, global, 97; downward pattern of causation, 19; factory-farming unethical, 90; hunting animals for food or sport?, 89; nature and culture condition one another, 88; A New Environmental Ethics, 87; plants of value for healthy environment, 90–91; plants self-actualizing but not self-aware, 90–91; President Bill Clinton/Singer, Peter/Regan, Tom, 87–88; reciprocal causality between systems, 88; restoration efforts, 96; species naturally reproduce, should be protected for ecodiversity, 4–6; system as a whole greater than the sum of its parts, 94 Rosen, Robert, 61 Rovelli, Carlo, x Russell, Bertrand, 19 Salthe, Stanley, 60 Sartre, Jean Paul, 60

152

Index

society, as higher order reality than its parts, 102 Spenser, Herbert, 5, 14, 61 Spinoza, Baruch, 13, 22 subjectivity-objectivity, 26–27 system, viii, ix–x, 5, 29–30, 31, 47, 102; autocatalytic system/centripetality, 65; bottom-up systems/agency, 49, 69 deterministic systems, 49–49, 60, 67; Gaia/global ecosystem, 62; global system as mega-organism, 94, 98; market-oriented/deterministic, 63, 70–71, 95; open-ended systems, 39–54, 60, 67, 129; proto-ecosystem, 68; system as a whole greater than the sum of its parts, 94, 101; topdown systems/agency, 11–12 transformism, 6 Trinity, doctrine of, 101–15, 127–28; incarnation of Divine Word, 103;

personhood: Divine, 102–6; SpiritChristology, 103–4; subsistent relations, 103–4 Ulanowicz, Robert, xi, 53–54, 64–71, 130 Watson, J. B., 77 Weiner, Norbert, 43–44; artificial intelligence, 43–44; Cybernetics, 43–44 Whitehead, Alfred N., x, 4, 13, 15, 19–35, 60, 102, 119, 130; fallacy of misplaced concreteness, x, 21–22, 50; Hartshorne, Charles, 79 whole-part relation, x–xi, 6, 5, 23, 26, 47, 48, 101 qualitative, x, 22, 53, 124–25; quantitative, x, 22, 53, 124– 25; subsidiarity, principle of, 126 Zeno’s paradoxes, 12

About the Author

Joseph Bracken is Emeritus Professor of Theology at Xavier University, Cincinnati, Ohio. He has specialized over the years in linking the cosmology of Alfred North Whitehead with classical Christian doctrine in discussing relations between religion and science. What is needed for better exchange between them, Bracken believes, is a governing metaphor or model of the way that physical reality is mentally constructed. Instead of individual entity or Aristotelian substance as a starting point for a new worldview, Bracken suggests instead groups of individual entities organized into societies or systems according to a basic pattern or mode of operation. Each society or system is organized in terms of organisms, large or small, governed by whole-part relations in which the parts condition the reality of the whole and the existing whole, in turn, constrains the interplay between the individual parts and the overall environment. His latest books are Does God Roll Dice? (2012), The World in the Trinity (2014), and Church as Dynamic Life-System (2019).

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